Black and grey sketch-style tattoo on an outer thigh, photographed with a black Metallica bodysuit and fingerless gloves.

Black and grey thigh tattoo with band top

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph is cropped below the face and shows a person from the chest to the thighs. A large black and grey tattoo with loose, sketchy linework covers the outer thigh, with a second partial tattoo visible on the upper arm and shoulder. The image is taken against a pale wall with soft, warm lighting, and the red and black band print on the bodysuit is the strongest colour in the frame.

Thigh Upper arm Shoulder Sketch

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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

Come closer to the oven, the lot of you, before the bread takes the cold out of the room. Ada Pell had flour under her nails and a drawing folded in her apron pocket the week the travelling inker came through Marlow Cross, and she never once let me see it. She said a drawing ought to stay loose until the skin decided what it wanted to be.

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The inker worked with a stub of charcoal on the back of an old bread ledger. Bramble first, he said, then a hare that had run into the thorns and never come out the same. He drew fast, with lines that trailed off like smoke, and where he lifted the charcoal the shape kept going without him. Ada said that was the trick of it. Leave the edges open so the thing can keep growing.

She bought the ledger page for the price of three eggs and walked out past the weir at four in the morning, when the lamps were still lit in the other bakeries and nobody was about to ask her why. The thorns were drawn so fine she swore they caught the light. At the water's edge the hare was sitting in the reeds, grey as the dawn, watching her hands. She set a heel of the mill loaf on the wet stone, and the hare ate it and went back into the brambles without a sound.

When the sun came up, Ada found the ledger page was blank where the hare had been. Only the running lines were left, and one soft grey smudge where it had stopped to look back. So that is why the bakery door at Marlow Cross is always left a hand's width open before dawn. Mind the step, and mind the grey shape in the doorway, for it has never once finished its run.