Traditional flash design of a shirtless boxer in red gloves squaring up to a llama, with flames, a rose and a Born to Fight banner.

Boxer and llama with Born to Fight banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A painted traditional-style design shows a moustached boxer in red gloves facing a llama that raises its own glove, with a fire between them. A scroll banner reading BORN TO FIGHT runs across the lower part, with a red flower at the top and another at the bottom. Bold black outlines, flat fills in red, green and tan, and soft pink halos behind the figures give it a classic old-school look.

Traditional Flame Banner Script Flower Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The booth went up on the gravel shoulder outside Cuesta Blanca just after dawn, and by noon the only thing drawing a crowd was the llama. Its owner, a widow called Nancy Pell who sold petrol from a tin shed, swore the animal had been reared to chase off the rams that wandered onto the road. Dermot Hale, who ran the bouts from the back of a lorry, did not believe a word of it until the llama flattened a sailor from Valparaiso with one lazy swing.

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Ezra Strand was thirty-eight, past his best, and proud of a moustache he kept waxed with a comb and a tin mirror. He was paid twelve pesos to stand in the ring with the animal, and the llama wore red gloves taped to its forelegs with the grave air of a bishop. Hale lit an oil drum for warmth, and the flames rose between them as the desert wind shook the ropes. Ezra danced. The llama stood on its hind legs and chewed, patient, until he came close enough to be reached.

In the third round the llama stopped swinging and looked past him, down the road running grey and empty towards the mountains. Ezra followed its gaze and saw a dust cloud far off, a lorry with its lamps dimmed and coming fast. He ducked out through the ropes, shouted for Nancy, and between them they dragged the drum off the shoulder just before the truck swung wide and thundered past, sparks rising where the fire had been.

Hale counted out the purse that evening with unsteady hands and offered the llama a sugar lump, which it refused. Ezra kept the red gloves and the painted banner that read BORN TO FIGHT, though the letters had been done in a hurry and the F leaned like a man against wind. He never did learn whether the llama had seen the lorry coming all along, or whether it had simply wanted a reason to stand its ground.