Colour tattoo of a cartoon garden gnome with a pink pointed hat, white beard and blue jacket, on a lower leg against a blue fabric background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Garden gnome on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon garden gnome stands upright, centred on the skin, with a tall pink hat, a white beard, a light blue jacket, a pink belt with a yellow buckle, orange trousers and white boots. Bold dark outlines define the figure and the shading is soft and minimal. The gnome fills the frame vertically against blue fabric on both sides.

Calf Hat Beard Boot Cartoon

Find an artist for this

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

In the years after the salt came up through the orchards, the people of Harrow Dell kept one thing standing in every yard, and it was not a saint or a sword but a small painted man with a red hat and a beard as white as lime. Old Tamsin Crake had the last one left on her step. Her neighbours said it had been bought from a travelling tinker who wanted nothing but a bowl of barley for it, and that the bowl had been the only fair trade anyone made that winter.

Keep reading

Every spring the gnome had to be turned to face the river, because the river was the thing that came in the dark. Tamsin did it with her knuckles against his blue jacket, saying the old words her mother had said: face the water, mind the gate, keep your boots dry. Nobody remembered what would happen if the boots got wet. Nobody wanted to find out.

The year the river rose to the third step, a boy from the upper town came down with a lamp and a stolen crowbar, meaning to take the gnome to the market where the glass men paid in clean water. He found Tamsin sitting on the step with her back to the figure, humming, and he asked why she had not turned it. She said it had been turned already, by the boy's own father, sixty years gone, and that a thing that is watched long enough learns to watch back.

The boy put the crowbar down. Next morning the water had gone back to the reeds, and a fresh bowl of barley sat by the gate with no name on it. Tamsin kept the lamp. The gnome kept facing the river, and the yard stayed dry.