Close view of black and grey tattoos on a tanned thigh, including a mandala on the upper thigh, a skull with floral detail on the outer thigh and a sun design lower down, while the wearer holds half a

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala, skull and sun tattoos on thighs

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a pair of tanned legs with tattoos on both thighs. The left thigh carries a black mandala with fine linework and dotted shading, and the right thigh has a skull with floral detail above a sun-like design with wavy rays on the lower thigh. The ink is in black and grey tones, and the composition is taken from above with a cropped view of the legs, a grey fabric and a halved coconut held in one hand.

Geometric Botanical Thigh Mandala Skull Sun Floral

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

The cook on the Marigold Vane had a rule about coconuts: nobody cracked one before the sun cleared the horizon, because the milk stayed cooler that way. Ada Penhallow broke the rule on the thirty-first day out, sharpening a machete on the galley step while the watch below grumbled. She split the nut clean through the middle so both halves sat on the table like bowls, white and wet and smelling of somewhere we had never been.

Keep reading

The mate, Ruth Ansell, kept a logbook with a drawing pasted inside the cover. It was a sun with wavy rays, copied off the compass rose on the Admiralty chart, and beside it a ring of pencilled lines that she called the mandala, because her mother had taught her that every true bearing had a centre. Below both she had sketched a skull with flowers growing from its eye sockets, lifted from a dead botanist's herbarium we carried to Lisbon and never delivered. Ruth said the skull was the honest part of any chart.

The wind died on the thirty-eighth day. For nine days the Marigold lay on a sea like poured glass, and we ate hard biscuit and drank the coconut milk by the mugful, measuring nothing. On the ninth morning Ada scratched a circle into the tar of the deck with the tip of a marlinspike, marked it with the sun's shadow as it crept across, and told us the wind would come when the shadow reached the seam. It came that afternoon. Nobody could say whether she was right or the sea was simply tired of us.

We kept the shells. When we made port at Funchal, a customs man asked what we wanted with two cracked coconuts, and Ruth said they told the time. He laughed, but she was not joking, and neither was I.