Watercolour style tattoo of a pink and purple castle with teal spires and a handwritten quote above, on the thigh.

Castle and quote on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large castle with pink walls, teal roofs and a tall purple spire sits at the centre of the design, with a purple wash behind it and small star shapes scattered around. Above it, a handwritten script quote runs across several lines in black. The shading is soft and blended, with dark outlines on the castle and a mix of pink, purple and teal ink on pale skin.

Thigh Castle Star Galaxy Script Quote Spire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Hazelmere House had been dead since March, so Lorraine carried the paint up fifteen flights in a plastic bag that bit into her fingers. Dean followed with the stepladder, complaining at every landing. "Nobody's going to notice a castle on a lift door," he said. "They'll notice the stairs are still wet." She didn't answer. She'd promised Mrs Achebe on the ninth floor that the old doors would look like something worth opening.

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The castle went on first, pink walls and teal roofs and a tall purple spire she had to paint twice because the first one looked like a bruise. Lorraine had sign-written for the fairground at Haverstock before it closed, and the castle was the one thing she'd kept from those summers, the cardboard tower lit from behind above the dodgems. She mixed the purple with a drop of blue until it looked like the sky after the fireworks had gone.

Above it she lettered the words the way her mother had taught her, each line slanting as if the letters were running for the bus: here you leave today, and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy. Dean read it twice and said that was a lot of world for one lift. By dusk the stars she'd dotted around the edges were catching the stairwell light.

Nobody got the lift working. But on Saturday the kids from the fourth floor started knocking on the doors and pressing their faces to the paint, as if the castle were a real gate. Lorraine watched from the landing while Dean folded the ladder, thinking how you could never quite see the people inside that cardboard tower. Then Mrs Achebe's grandson pushed the dead button anyway, and somewhere far down the shaft a motor she had forgotten about began to hum.