Traditional style black and grey leg sleeve on a thigh and calf, with a sugar skull, a moth, a kite, stars and a script line.

Leg sleeve with sugar skull and stars

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A full leg sleeve runs from the upper thigh down to the ankle, showing a sugar skull with a small red rose above it, a moth, a kite, birds, a crown, stars and a line of script. The linework is bold and the shading is mostly grey, with the red rose as the only notable colour. The leg is photographed standing on a wooden floor with a plain background, and the tattoos fill most of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Calf Ankle Sugar skull Rose Script Moth Star Bird Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Gull Cottage boarding house opened the attic window after dark, because of the moths. They rose off the marsh in late August, grey and heavy as wet paper, and gathered round the one lamp left burning at the top of the stairs. Old Tamsin Rook said they were drowned sailors wanting a road home, and that you fed them by keeping the window shut and the lamp low.

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Eli Vosper did not believe her. He had come down from Bristol with a crate of paper kites painted with stars, crowns and birds, and a small tin of red paint he would not let anyone touch. On the first wild night of the season his best kite, a diamond with a rose inked at its heart, tore loose from his hand on the cliff path and went out over the water, its tail of knotted rag streaming behind like a line of writing no one could read.

He climbed to the attic with a candle, threw up the sash and leaned into the wind. The moths came in past him by the hundred and settled on the cord, on his sleeves, on the rose painted on the kite that had landed, somehow, on the sill. He did not sing them out. He only held the string and waited, and the wind dropped, and the moths lifted one by one and went back into the dark.

In the morning the kite lay in the gorse with its paper whole. On the rose sat a single moth, its wings folded flat like a shut book, and out past the point the sea had gone as still as slate.