Colour traditional tattoo on a thigh of a smiling masked figure in a top hat, with two red roses and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Masked figure and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo on the thigh shows a smiling figure in a white mask with a thin moustache and red cheeks, wearing a black top hat, with long dark hair falling beside the face. Two large red roses with green leaves sit to the right, and a striped, blade-like shape runs diagonally across the lower left. Bold black outlines and simple solid shading give it a classic traditional look against the skin.

Traditional Thigh Mask Top hat Rose Leaves Hair Blade Figure

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

Mab Tregarthen had kept the hat shop on Fore Street for thirty-one years, and in all that time the gentleman in the white mask had come in only on the last night of the autumn fair. He wore a black top hat he never removed, a moustache painted on the mask in one neat stroke, and a smile that did not move. He bought one red rose from her barrow, paid with a coin still warm from his pocket, and walked off towards the harbour holding the stem upright like a candle.

Keep reading

Her son Eli, nine that year and sure he was a clever detective, asked why the man never spoke. Mab said a man who smiles without stopping has nothing left to say, and that was the end of it. But Eli kept watch. He saw the gentleman hand his coins to the net-mender's widow, and saw him strip the thorns from his roses with a striped barber's blade, one clean pull per stem. Eli carried the shape of that blade in his head all winter.

The fair came round again, and this year the man did not come to the barrow. Eli went looking and found him on the harbour wall, hat tilted, roses laid in a row along the stone. The mask gave nothing away, but his shoulders were moving as if at a joke no one else had heard. Eli asked at last what the roses were for. The man lifted one and held it out. Ask your mother, he said, in a voice like dry paper, and left the second rose on the wall for the boy.

Mab read the card tied to that stem under the lamp: the name of a fishing smack and a date eleven years gone. She did not cry. She fetched the old blade from the drawer, cut the thorns from her own bloom, and sold every rose on the barrow until the lamps went out. Eli pressed the second rose between the pages of a hat-maker's ledger, and every autumn after, he left the harbour lamp burning for a man who never came back.