Neo-traditional colour tattoos on both thighs, showing a horned ox in a red harness with yellow peonies on the left and a snarling white wolf with a chrysanthemum on the right.

Horned ox and snarling wolf on thighs

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two large tattoos sit side by side on the thighs of a person in plaid shorts. The left shows a horned ox wearing a red harness, surrounded by yellow peony-like flowers and teal wash, while the right shows a snarling white wolf beside a coral chrysanthemum with teal foliage. Bold outlines, soft shading and a watercolour-style background wash give the piece a bright, mixed colour palette, and a small maneki-neko cat tattoo is visible lower down near the ankle.

Neo-trad Japanese Thigh Ankle Horn Peony Wolf Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Maneki-neko Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ox came up the lane in the grey before breakfast, still wearing the red harness her mother had buckled on her at the autumn fair, though nobody in the valley had asked her to pull a cart in thirty years. The bell at the old hill school had rung the night before for the first time since the roof came in, and she had heard it from the lower pasture and come at once, head low, hooves knocking loose stones from the wall.

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The wolf was waiting at the stile. He had come down from the high pines with wild chrysanthemums tangled in his ruff, the white and coral ones that grew along the wall where the children once buried their slates. He had been the quietest boy in Miss Ashdown's class, and the ox had been the one who carried the coal in from the shed, so they had never been much for talking. He showed his teeth when he saw her. It was how he said he was sorry for missing the last gathering, and she understood it the way she always had.

They went in together through the broken door. Inside, the desks were stacked with ivy, and the blackboard still held the sum Miss Ashdown had left on it the day the school closed. On the sill sat the tin cat she had given the class for luck, one paw raised, beckoning anyone who was late. The wolf pulled a flower from his ruff and laid it across the ox's harness, over the buckle, where it stayed.

They sat down at their old desks, which were far too small for them now, and the ox read the sum aloud. The wolf worked it again in the margin with a stub of chalk. The answer was the same as it had always been, and neither of them minded that it had taken so long to arrive.