Back view of two legs with black blackwork tattoos forming a cathedral skyline, striped sun and arched bridge across the thighs and knees.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black landscape design across both thighs and knees

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the backs of two bare legs, with a black tattoo that wraps around each thigh and knee in a stocking-like band. The design includes gothic spires, a striped sun, arched bridges, layered hills and vertical bars, all drawn in solid black and fine parallel lines. The ink is black on pale skin against a plain light grey backdrop, with the design centred and symmetrical across both legs.

Blackwork Thigh Calf Spire Sun Stripe Bridge Arch Hill Landscape City skyline

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

Leave the trays be, Mattie, the dough needs its rest or it will sulk like a cat. Sit on the flour sack and I'll tell you why the sun comes up in stripes over Varrow. The city had seven spires in those days and only one sun, and the sun was a lazy thing that lay down behind the hills until the bells told it to get up. Nobody could make it hurry except a baker called Orla Penhallow, who had flour in her hair and no patience for anyone's idleness.

Keep reading

Every night Orla climbed the cathedral tower with a basket of crusts and a fistful of salt, and she called up to the sun that if it rose over her ovens first, she would bake it a loaf every morning, warm and split down the middle the way it liked. The sun agreed, because suns are vain and a loaf is a small price for being admired. But the sun grew greedy. It wanted more loaves, then more light, and it came up through the arches of the bridge so fast that the river mist cut it into bars, and the hills caught it in long black lines.

Orla had only so many loaves in her, and one winter morning she gave the sun the last of the dough. It rose pale and striped, the colour of a burnt crust, and it has risen that way ever since, with a bite taken out of the top where she tore it off for herself.

So when you see those stripes on the shutters, that's the bargain still being paid. Now pull the peel out, lad, and mind your fingers. The sun's coming, and it will want its bread.