Black and grey realism tattoo on a thigh showing a man with dark swept-back hair playing a guitar, framed by peony and lily flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey portrait with guitar on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the outer thigh, showing a realistic portrait of a man with swept-back dark hair, wearing a buttoned military-style shirt and playing an acoustic guitar. Pale flowers, likely peonies and lilies, fill the background and lower edge of the piece. Soft shading and fine detail in the face, fabric and petals create depth across the composition.

Realism Botanical Thigh Portrait Man Guitar Flower Peony Lily

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Morag had the guitar on her knee before the ferry cleared the slipway at Ottervaig, because the wind off the sound would have the strings flat by the time they reached the far side. Nobody on the island had asked her to play. Her uncle had asked her, years back, to keep the thing in tune and stop it gathering damp in the boathouse, and he had said it in the flat voice he used for weather. She had kept her promise the way he kept his shirts, buttoned to the throat and ironed on the wrong days.

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The crossing took forty minutes. Mrs Gillies sold tea from a flask and the Tennant boys ate crisps from a bag the size of a pillow. Past the skerries the peonies on the chapel wall would be out, pale as the spray, and the lilies bent over the graves as if they were listening. Morag played the old waltz her uncle hummed when the boat was empty, and she found, to her irritation, that her fingers still knew where to go.

Halfway over, a surveyor came up from the cabin with a clipboard and sunburn across the back of his neck. He stood near the rail and made no pretence of not listening. When she finished he asked if the tune had a name. She said it didn't, not one anyone had written down, and he nodded as though she'd given him a fact about the tide tables.

At the pier he carried her case up the ramp without being asked and set it down by the bus shelter. 'Same time Thursday?' he said. She told him the boat didn't run on Thursdays, and he said he knew, then went off to find his car. She watched the wake fold itself white behind the ferry, and a single petal, blown loose from the bow garland, came down on the wet tarmac beside her shoe.