Traditional coloured tattoo on the thigh showing a golden helmet with a red crest and a black dome in a heart shape, with a blue banner.

Helmet and dome heart on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A coloured tattoo on the outer thigh shows a gold helmet with a red plume and a black dome with a white checkered band, set within a heart-shaped outline. A blue banner across the lower part of the heart carries the lettering COME ALONG PONDS. The design uses bold black outlines and flat, solid fills with light shading on the metal.

Traditional Thigh Helmet Heart Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the lighters believed Ponds when he came aboard at Wapping with a Roman helmet under his arm. Gold, he swore, and warm as a loaf, with a red horsehair crest gone the colour of brick dust. We assumed the rum had found him first. Ponds was a finder. He had once brought up a sextant from a skip, a stuffed heron from a dredger and a Victorian piano from the foreshore, which he sold to a chapel in Limehouse for four pounds and a pork pie.

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The helmet was the least of it. The thing he really wanted us to see was the black dome he had dug out beside it, shaped like a pudding bowl turned upside down and banded with white checks like a taxi. It had one red eye and a voice like a kettle in a cellar. When he set it on the wheelhouse step it swivelled, slowly, and said something about the tide that none of us could follow, except that it had been waiting for him in particular.

'Come along, Ponds,' the thing said, and Ponds, who had never once in forty years come along anywhere he was told, put the helmet on his head and walked straight down the gangplank into the river. We ran to the rail. There was nothing but brown water and a bubble or two, then a gold glint sliding under the arch of Tower Bridge like a coin dropped down a well.

Next morning the ebb left a crate of pork pies on the foreshore, still warm. Nobody has ever sold them to a chapel. The dome is still moored off Cherry Garden Pier, flashing its checks at the gulls, and every so often it calls out in its kettle voice for someone who isn't us.