Colour traditional-style tattoo on a side ribs area, with a red heart, purple flowers, a green four-leaf clover, dice and script lettering.

Colourful heart, flowers and clover on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A woman in white lace lingerie shows a large colour tattoo down her left side, from the ribs towards the hip. The design includes a red heart, purple flowers, a green four-leaf clover, red dice and script lettering, outlined in bold black lines with solid fills. The background is black and white, which makes the colour of the tattoo stand out.

Traditional Ribs Heart Flower Clover Dice Script Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty pounds, the man on the dice stall says, and he says it to the rain rather than to you. You have three days of wages in your apron pocket and a red die you have rolled a hundred times since the fair pulled up stakes outside Carlisle. Your dad always swore the trick was to back the number that came up last, because the wheel forgets nothing and neither do the dice.

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The fair is in its final week before winter quarters. Lights strung between the waltzer and the candyfloss van buzz like wasps, and the generator coughs every time the big wheel stops. Maggie Lusk, who runs the hook-a-duck, has been telling anyone who will listen that the Carlisle ground is cursed, on account of a girl who fell from the tilt in 1971. Nobody believes her, but everybody checks the bolts twice.

Tonight the dice come up three sixes and you feel it in your back teeth. Ray Tunstall pays out with a hand that smells of hot oil, then slides across a stuffed bear with a satin heart stitched on its chest. Keep it, he says. It's the only thing on this stall that isn't a lie.

You walk back past the ghost train with the bear under your arm and a clover pin you bought off a chandler's barrow pricking your thumb through the lining of your coat. Your sister will be waiting at the caravan with the kettle on and a grin that says she has already heard. Behind you a single die clicks on the wet tarmac, showing one pip, and you decide not to turn round.