Colour traditional tattoo on the thigh showing a heart made from a golden helmet with a red plume, a black shoe and a sword, with a blue banner reading Come Along Ponds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Helmet, shoe and banner heart on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A heart-shaped composition is formed by a golden helmet with a red plume on the left and a black shoe with a checkered pattern on the right. A sword runs diagonally through the design, and a blue banner across the lower half reads COME ALONG PONDS. Bold black outlines, flat fills and simple highlights define the shapes, and the tattoo sits on the outer thigh against a brick wall.

Traditional Thigh Helmet Heart Shoe Sword Banner Plume

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The helmet had been gilded for the Whitsun pageant by Mrs Hardcastle, who had used the last tin of paint meant for the church gate and a length of red wool unpicked from a cardigan nobody wore any more. It sat on the trestle table in the village hall beside a cardboard sword and a pair of black plimsolls with a chequerboard toe, both borrowed from the infants' sports cupboard. Dennis Pryce, cast as Achilles because he was the tallest boy in Long Ponds, would not try the helmet on until the others had gone home.

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He carried it out anyway on the Sunday, under one arm, when the Sunday school set off for the pond with the banner on its pole. COME ALONG PONDS, the lettering said, painted by his sister in a blue that had run in the rain. The grass was wet and the plimsolls squeaked, and by the stile he had decided the helmet looked better than anything the vicar had ever worn. Nobody told him to take it off.

At the water's edge the banner went down in the reeds and the younger ones shrieked at a moorhen. Dennis stepped onto the mud to show them the sword trick and his left plimsoll stayed where it was, sucked off his foot with a sound like a kiss. He reached for it up to the elbow and came up with nothing but weed and a grey chill. Somewhere behind him Mrs Hardcastle was calling the register, and he could hear her finding his name.

He walked home along the lane with one shoe and the helmet still on, the red plume bent flat against the wind. At the gate his mother looked at the gilt, then at his bare white foot, and said only that he had come along, which was what the banner asked. He left the helmet on the step where the rain would not reach it, and the plimsoll he never found went on being somewhere in the pond.