Neo-trad style colour tattoo of a grinning clown with a striped top hat and red bow tie on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clown portrait with top hat on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bald clown with a grinning, open-mouthed expression and a striped top hat in red, white and blue, with a red bow tie and a small skull-like detail at the centre. Bold black outlines define the portrait, with painted shading on the skin tones and blue face paint. Loose red splatter sits behind the figure, and the photo is taken straight on against a soft grey background.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Clown Top hat Bow tie Portrait Splatter Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Harrow's Fair had seen Dandy Lusk without his hat since the spring, so when the boy from the ghost train found it snagged on the generator fence, the whole lot of them stood about in the drizzle as if he'd found a dead bird. Nell took it from him by the brim. It was soaked through and smelled of greasepaint and wet canvas. Pinned to the sodden red bow tie underneath was a little bone-white skull, the sort of thing nobody in the show had ever seen him wear. The tie usually lived in his coat pocket and only came out on Saturdays, when the children counted down from ten.

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She found him in the caravan at the far end of the field, sitting in front of a cracked mirror with his face half-scrubbed. The blue had run into the grey stubble along his jaw. Without the paint his mouth looked smaller, almost apologetic, and he didn't turn round when she set the hat on the table between the tins of cold cream. He said the tie had belonged to his brother, Samuel, who had walked out of a Bristol lodging house one winter and never sent word. They had been going to run the fair together. Samuel had wanted the skull because, he said, everybody laughs harder at a joke that knows what it is.

Nell looked at the hat for a long time. Outside, rain pattered on the awning and the generator coughed back to life, rattling the bulbs along the midway. Dandy finally reached for a fresh sponge. "Saturday," he said, and held the hat out to her without looking up. She put it on. The brim dripped onto her collar, cold and exact, and in the mirror a stranger in red and white stripes was already smiling with his whole face.