Black linework outline tattoo of several cartoon princesses and a mermaid with ornate scrollwork across the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon princesses outline on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a large outline tattoo covering the outer thigh, with several cartoon princess figures and a mermaid at the lower part, linked by ornate scrollwork. The lines are single-weight and unshaded, and no colour fill is visible. The thigh fills most of the frame against a purple upholstered surface.

Thigh Mermaid Scrollwork Cartoon character Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find them on the third day of clearing the east range, when the rain has washed the plaster back to bare stone. A wall of women in outline, drawn in a black lead that has gone silver with age: a princess with a rose at her collar, another with her hair piled high in a tower of scrolls, one sitting at a window with her chin on her hand. Someone has framed them with curling acanthus that runs down into the rubble like ivy looking for water. Nobody has coloured them. The paint for that room was never bought, and the commission was marked finished regardless.

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Mistress Harrow, who holds the lease and the keys and very little patience, says the painter was a boy from the village who took his fee in cider and left before the varnish. You don't argue. You kneel by the lowest figure, a mermaid stretched along the skirting with her tail curled into the scrollwork, and you notice the lines are heavier there, gone over more than once, as if she was the one he couldn't bring himself to leave.

That evening the river comes up through the cellar grates, the way it does every spring, and by morning the moat is lapping at the sill of the east range. You go down with a torch. The mermaid's tail is underwater now, and the lead has begun to bleed into the damp plaster, a faint grey wash spreading out from her lines. You stand in the cold to your knees and tell yourself it is only silt.

By noon the water has drained away and left a mark on the wall, a dark tidemark above the others. Every princess is still bare stone, except the mermaid, who has taken a little of the river's grey and now looks as though she has been swimming.