Colour realism portrait tattoo on an upper arm, set in an ornate red and orange circus-style frame with a monkey, an elephant and a peacock, and lettering reading Michael Jackson.

Circus-framed portrait tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large portrait of a face, with eyes looking forward, sits inside an ornate red and orange frame that has a monkey at the top and an elephant and peacock below. The lettering above the face is set in a red serif style on a pale band, and the work has smooth, soft shading with a bold outline. The palette is mostly warm reds, oranges and yellows, with blues and greys in the animals and the lower emblem.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, and mind the draught from that door, the tide's turning and it always brings the cold up the steps. My grandfather painted wagon frames for the Lorne and Dunmore Travelling Menagerie the summer their big top came into Porthkell on a coal barge. Red and gold, every scroll of it, with a little brass monkey at the crown holding up a lantern nobody ever lit.

Keep reading

The ringmaster, Ambrose Tull, had a waxed moustache and boots like coal scuttles, and he wanted his name across the top band in letters tall enough to read from the far side of the quay. My grandfather mixed the vermilion and painted them, every serif. Then the elephant, Hester, took against the peacock and the whole menagerie went mad in the night. Tull blamed the sign painter. He docked the wages and sailed on the Tuesday tide with the frame still tacky and unhung.

What Tull never knew was that my grandfather had painted a second face under the first, a plain fisher girl with salt in her hair who used to sit on the harbour wall shelling crabs for her supper. He put her eyes in the middle of the frame where the ringmaster's should have been, and nobody saw it until the ship was past the Mewstone.

The frame came back on the next coal barge with a note that said only, keep the monkey, he's the only honest one aboard. It still hangs over our bar. Mind the peacock, she bites.

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