Black and grey realism tattoo of a ballerina in a tutu bending over a stepladder, placed on the outer thigh.

Ballerina on a stepladder on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo on the outer thigh shows a woman in a ballet-style tutu bending forward over a wooden stepladder, with a flower in her hair. The shading is soft and detailed, with smooth gradients on the skin and fabric and a blurred, indistinct background that includes what looks like a vehicle and a building. The composition is a vertical, vintage-style scene in which the figure sits in the centre and the ladder anchors the lower half.

Realism Thigh Flower Woman Vehicle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had counted the rungs of the stepladder every night for eleven years, and tonight there were still seven, which meant nobody had cut the bottom one for scrap again. The hall under Dock Nine was cold. Sound came back off the girders a half-second late, so every cough in the empty seats sounded like a second cough.

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Her daughter, Ines, was up on the top step with a pin between her teeth, fixing a ribbon that had slipped loose from her left slipper. Outside the bay doors a transport rover idled, and its tremor ran up through the boards and into Mae's shins. A headlamp had been left on somewhere out there. Its light came through the vents in long grey bars and lay across the floor like tape.

"Hold still," Mae said. "You'll bring the lamp down with you."

"It's the only thing holding the set up." Ines leaned, found the knot, and the ladder complained under her. Mae put a hand on the frame, the way her own mother had done, a hand that never really helped but made the other person feel watched.

The curtain went up at nineteen hundred. Ines finished the knot, stepped down, and turned the slipper over to check it, the same small twist of the wrist Mae had seen in mirrors for thirty years. Then the rover's engine cut out, and in the quiet Mae climbed the ladder herself, one rung, then another, until she could see over the lamp housing into the seats. Forty miners sat in their work coats, faces lit grey and patient. The ribbon was straight. Her daughter was already walking into the light.