Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo covering the full back and chest, with a Statue of Liberty portrait, a skull holding a torch, roses and a central religious figure.

Full back and chest black and grey tattoo

Neo-trad · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two views of a man's torso show a large black and grey tattoo across the back and chest. The back features a Statue of Liberty portrait, a skull with a crown holding a torch, a cityscape and the words CASH RULES in script. The chest centres on a religious figure framed by roses and rays, with scroll lettering above and PARADISE across the lower abdomen; the shading is smooth and detailed throughout.

Neo-trad Realism Back Chest Skull Rose Script Lettering Clown Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The backdrop had to be finished before the Whitsun fair opened on the Downs, and Mr Pilling had already decided the Statue of Liberty looked like a Methodist. I was up a stepladder at four in the morning with a tin of lamp black and a brush worn to a point, bringing her crown back into the sky. Nobody paid a penny to see Liberty in a field outside Wellow. They paid to see the torch on the booth front, lit from behind by a bulb that buzzed, and the clown in the corner who seemed to wink whenever the lamp swung.

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Pilling's money lived in the cash booth. He had a board painted over its door in gold leaf, CASH RULES, and beneath it a skull with a paper crown copied off a playbill for a strongman who had died in Bath. "Folk don't come for the dodgems," he said, tapping the skull with his pipe. "They come to watch the coins go in." I said the skull looked hungry. He said that was the point, and paid me in silver half-crowns, which I took home and buried under the loose board in my mother's kitchen.

The last panel was the one behind the stage, a city of tin roofs and smoke I had never seen, because Pilling said a backdrop must show somewhere a farmer wanted to go. In the autumn the fair folded, the coins went missing, and Pilling blamed the lemonade lads. I went back to the field alone one dusk with the last of the lamp black. Beneath the roses at the foot of the panel, where the rays spread out like a sunrise, I painted one word in the careful lettering my mother used for hymn numbers: PARADISE. It was the only true thing on the booth, and it was in my hand.