Close-up of a gold metallic floral and paisley-style ornamental design on the upper thigh of a seated woman in a red sweater and grey shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold ornamental design on upper thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A seated woman's upper thigh shows an ornate design in metallic gold, built from swirling paisley-like motifs, scrolls and small floral shapes. The linework is bold and the motifs are symmetrical in places, sitting on the outer thigh below grey shorts. The rest of the frame is warm red knitwear with a gold elephant print, grey fabric and a patterned blanket, so the gold design stands out clearly against the skin.

Thigh Floral Paisley Swirl Ornament Scroll Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold thread came in a tin with a bent hinge, wrapped in a page of the Stornoway Gazette, and Ruth Calloway spent a week deciding whether to use it. Her father always said gold would never hold its colour on wool. He had been right about most things, and he had been dead since March, so the thread seemed a fair test. The lamp at Skerrivore was hers to wind now, and so was the loom in the back room that had been her mother's and would not sit level on the flagstones.

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Her mother had left a pattern drawn on the back of a tide table: a teardrop that curled in on itself, scrolls spilling from its tail, and small five-petalled flowers tucked into every gap. Ruth worked it through the long nights, one pass of the beam sweeping across the window for every row she finished. By the third week the shawl had grown a pale ivory border and a centre that looked, when the light caught it, like a field of wheat pressed flat by wind. She ran out of gold at the last scroll and sat with the needle in her fingers until the sky went grey.

The fog came down on the fourth of October and the Ardmore boat was late back. Ruth climbed to the gallery with the shawl over her arm, unsure why, and when the horn sounded faint and wrong to the south she held the wool up into the beam. The gold flared once, then again, a scatter of sparks swinging through the white air. She kept it turning until the horn came closer and steadier, and she did not stop until the bow nosed out of the murk below the rocks.

Donald Ferris brought the boat in himself and climbed the stone stair without a word. He looked at the shawl for a long time, then at her hands, and asked what it was for. Ruth said she didn't know yet. He touched the last scroll, where the gold ran out, and said nothing, which from Donald was thanks.