Colour tattoo of the cartoon characters Calvin and Hobbes lying under a dark tree with falling leaves, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calvin and Hobbes asleep under a tree on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a small boy with yellow spiky hair lying on the ground beside an orange and black striped tiger, both under a large dark tree with leaves drifting down. The tree trunk and foliage are rendered in solid black with purple-grey shading, while the figures use bold outlines with flat orange, yellow and white fills. The design is set low on the side of the torso, with loose falling leaves extending across the skin around the main scene.

Ribs Tiger Tree Leaves Cartoon Character

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

The tree at the bottom of Harrow Lane has dropped its leaves on the same patch of grass every October since the council stopped sweeping, and I have never once seen the boy leave before the light does. He arrives with a satchel that smells of wet cardboard and a striped creature roughly the size of a sofa cushion, which he insists is called Mr Pemberton, though it has never once answered to that name in my hearing.

Keep reading

I watch from the kitchen window over my tea. They lie side by side in the leaves, the boy with his arms behind his head and the tiger with its chin on his shoulder, and they argue about things I can only half hear. Last week it was whether a sum could be wrong if it came out even. The tiger said yes. The boy said that was cheating. I thought the tiger had the better case, though I kept that to myself.

Then on Thursday the rain came in sideways and I expected the lane to be empty. Instead the boy was still there, soaked to the skin, curled against the trunk with the satchel for a pillow. The tiger had stretched itself across him like a blanket and was staring straight at my window, as if it had known all along that I'd be watching.

I took my old army greatcoat down the path and laid it over them both. Neither woke. In the morning it was gone, and the satchel too, and there was a single orange leaf pinned to my gate with a pebble, which I have kept in my pocket ever since.