Colour tattoo of a grinning clown with a red nose and torn skin edges on a lower leg, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grinning clown face tattoo on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A clown face with a wide toothy grin, a red bulbous nose and shaded grey eyes sits inside a ripped-open area of skin, with the red edges of the tear fading into the surrounding leg. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with grey tones on the face and brighter red and green accents. The design fills the calf and is photographed straight on under a flash, which creates a glare across the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mask came off in the rain at Ostia, and I have never been able to tell the crowd whether it was the wine or the fishmonger's boy who pushed me. I was Scaurus the mimus then, forty years old and still making Rome laugh with a red leather nose stitched to my face. The nose was my fortune. Every Saturday I gave the bridge-men a grin so wide that even the magistrates had to look away from their dice.

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Then the rain got under the paint. The old glue of pitch and fish-skin softened, and when I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand the whole face came away in a strip, a flap of painted skin hanging from the jaw like a torn sail. Under it, on the living skin, the same grin was waiting, teeth bared, grey eyes staring out of a split I had not felt opening. Nobody screamed. The boy who had pushed me just sat down on the quay and laughed until he wept.

I went home with the nose in my fist and sat up with a lamp and a bowl of vinegar, trying to scrape the thing clean. My wife Lucilla brought me bread and watched me over the lamp. "You have never looked more like yourself," she said, and for once I did not know if she was teasing.

The next Saturday I went back to the bridge and took no mask at all. I tore the rest of the wool from my shoulders, pulled the red nose from my pocket and pressed it onto my face, where it stuck of its own accord. The crowd roared. Lucilla says that was the last honest performance I ever gave.

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