Small dotted-outline ghost tattoo with grey shading and pink cheeks, set among traditional colour tattoos on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted ghost on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A small ghost with a dotted outline, black dot eyes, an open mouth and pink cheeks sits on the lower leg. The outline is stippled and the body is softly shaded in grey, while the surrounding tattoos include bold coloured designs of a fish, a bird and an ornate rose in red, green, blue and yellow. The shot is taken close up against a dark background, with the ghost centred between the coloured pieces.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Ghost Fish Bird Rose

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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

Mind the step, that one's loose, and sit where the gull can't get at your crisps. Right. You'll want to know about Ada Sprake, who kept the light on Scarrow Head when the lamp still burned paraffin and the rocks ate boats for breakfast.

Keep reading

She had a cat called Mackerel and a tin of red paint she'd nicked from the lifeboat house. Every spring she painted cheeks on the wall of the foghorn shed, because she said a building with no face was a building nobody would trust. Her brother Tom drowned off the Vaskell reef in the March of '41, and that same month the fish came in thick as wool. Silver ones, then the odd green one with a face like a disappointed uncle, and a grey gull that perched on the rail every dusk and wouldn't be shooed.

Ada died in her chair with the kettle still warm. The lamp didn't go out that night, and nobody on the mainland could say who'd climbed up to trim the wick. Fishermen swore a small ghost went up the tower ahead of them, its edges dotted as if someone had sketched it in a hurry and was fond of it, its cheeks pink from the cold. It waved. That was the bit they always got wrong in the pub. It waved, and it was never once frightening.

So if you're out in the fog and you see a little white shape bobbing along the shoreline, mouth open, doing its best to say something, don't go running. It's only Ada checking the lamp and telling you the rocks are still where you left them. Now, who wants the one about the drowned piano?