Colour tattoo of the Joker laughing through clawing grey hands, with green and purple accents and HA lettering, on a lower leg.

Joker portrait on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of the Joker's grinning face sits on the calf, with grey hands gripping the top of his head and the letters HA scattered around the design. Bold black outlines and loose, painterly shading in green, purple and red give the piece a comic-book feel. The design fills most of the frame, with a tiled floor and a shoe at the bottom edge.

Neo-trad Calf Joker Comic character Hand Clown

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the grin first, painted on the lifeboat shed door at half five, green hair spilling down the planks like wet weed. Above it someone has scrawled HA in black, then HA again, climbing the timber until the letters run out of room and wander onto the brick.

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Harbour master Dougal Pryce wants it scrubbed before the tourists come, so you take the bucket. The hands are the trouble: grey gloved fingers clamped over the painted head, as if the face is trying to pull free of its own skull. Each time you wet the brush, the fingers seem to tighten. Gulls line the bollards to watch and cackle back at you.

On the third morning the grin has moved. The mouth is wider, paint beading off its teeth and pooling on the slipway. A girl in the ferry queue swears it laughed. You tell her it was the wind, and Pryce says the same, then goes quiet, then asks for the bucket himself.

That night you take a torch down alone. The door is blank except for a single HA, still wet, running toward the water like a punchline somebody has decided to finish.