Traditional colour tattoo of a yellow and black striped ghost trap between two red roses and green leaves, with a banner reading WHO YA' GONNA CALL?, on the outer thigh.

Ghost trap and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a yellow and black striped trap with a red-tipped handle, framed by two red roses, green leaves and a light blue backdrop. A banner across the top and bottom reads WHO YA' GONNA CALL? in black lettering. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give it a classic traditional look, and the subject is centred on the outer thigh.

Traditional Thigh Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harker took the cage down from the shelf above the gas meter the night the lamps on Tanner Row went out one after another, as if someone was working along the street with a snuffer. Her grandmother had left it to her with a sheet of instructions in pencil and one rule underlined twice: never carry it out on a Thursday.

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It was Thursday. Rain came sideways off the river and the cage hummed against her hip, warm as a loaf. Under the Crown, where the brewers had bricked up a passage before the war, something had been knocking for a week. The landlord had sent word with a boy who would not come past the step, and the boy had said only that the knocking asked for someone by name, and the name was hers.

She went down the iron stairs with a red rose pinned to her coat, the way her grandmother used to, and set the trap on the flagstones. The knocking stopped. A voice came out of the dark, very polite, asking whether she had brought the kettle. Nell said she had not. The voice said that was a shame, because it had been waiting a hundred and thirty years for a cup of tea and for somebody to ask it why it stayed.

So she asked. It took the rest of the night, and the rain had cleared by the time the thing in the cellar told her about the wife who never came back up from the brewery steps. Nell sat on the bottom stair and listened until the lid was warm under her palm. Then she let the poor thing go into the morning, and went home with the rose still on her coat, which was the one part her grandmother had never explained.