Traditional style colour tattoo of a scowling leprechaun in a green hat, smoking a cigar and holding a lit stick of dynamite, on a calf.

Angry leprechaun holding dynamite on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon leprechaun in a green bowler hat, with an orange beard and a green jacket, scowls while clenching a cigar and holds a red stick of dynamite with a lit fuse in a green-gloved hand. Bold black outlines define the figure, with flat green, orange, yellow and cream fills and simple shading on the arm and jacket. The design is centred on the calf and fills most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Traditional Calf Beard

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom Mulcahy had kept the Carrickroe light for nineteen years and had never once been bargained with by anything that wasn't a gull. So when the small green man came up the rock stairs at dusk, bowler hat jammed low and a cigar clamped in his teeth like a crowbar, Tom assumed it was the drink talking, and offered him a cup of tea.

Keep reading

The leprechaun refused the tea. He wanted the reef gone. Every spring, he said, the gannets roosted on the Black Teeth and their droppings made the water too bright for a proper pot of gold to hide in, and he meant to blow the lot into the Atlantic by Friday. He set a red stick of dynamite on the lamp-room sill, its fuse spitting sparks, and told Tom he could either hold the light or hold his tongue.

Tom had spent nineteen years watching ships come round that reef in fog. He was not about to let a man in a waistcoat blow it up over a bit of bird muck. He pointed out that dynamite and a cigar made a poor combination, and the leprechaun looked down at the ash on his own sleeve with real offence.

In the end it was the gulls that settled it. Tom let the fuse burn down to a finger's width, then lifted the stick and dropped it into the bucket of seawater he used for scrubbing the glass. The leprechaun roared, stamped, and vanished in a green puff. Tom kept the light turning all night. Come morning, the reef was still there, and so was a little heap of gold coins on the sill, every one of them wet.