Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a woman dressed as a clown, with a red bandana, red nose and white face paint, across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clown woman with red bandana on foot

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A woman's face in clown make-up fills the top of a foot, wearing a red knotted bandana and a red nose, with white face paint and blue eyes. The linework is bold and dark, and the shading is smooth with soft highlights on the skin tones. Bright red, white and blue dominate against the natural skin, and the design wraps across the top of the foot.

Neo-trad Other Clown Woman Bandana Face paint Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Hippodrome bills ever printed Nell Sprague's name in capitals, though she had done the Saturday matinee for nineteen seasons. She kept her greasepaint in an old tea tin and, on the morning the rain came sideways off the Irish Sea, she sat on an upturned crate behind the stage door and knotted her red bandana tight enough to hold her thoughts in place. The letter from Dolly's mother was still in her apron pocket, softened at the folds from being read on the tram.

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The girl arrived with a carpet bag and a voice like a kettle coming to the boil. 'Clowns are men,' she said, glaring at the mirror as if it had insulted her. Nell dabbed white over her cheeks and drew the eyes wide, then a little sad, because a clown who looks happy is only half a clown. 'The nose does the work,' Nell said. 'Everything else is paint and a bit of nerve.' Dolly laughed at that, and the laugh cracked the white at the corner of her mouth, and Nell let the crack stay.

When the house lights dimmed, the rain had stopped and the boards outside were steaming. Nell watched from the wings as Dolly tripped over a stool, caught a tin pail with one foot, and drew the first laugh of the afternoon from a boy in the gallery. It wasn't the clumsiness the crowd loved. It was the moment she looked up, startled at herself, and let them see the startle.

After the last house, Nell pressed the tin into Dolly's hands and untied her own bandana, folding it into a square the way her mother had folded tea towels. 'You'll want your own knot,' she said. Outside, the tide had come in over the sand and was smoothing away the day's footprints, big ones and small ones, all of them heading the same way.