Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching cameo portraits on thighs

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching cameo tattoos sit side by side on the upper thighs, each with an ornate scrolled frame. The left shows a man in profile with slicked-back hair and a bow tie, and the right shows a woman in profile with a rose in her hair and a veil. The linework is bold with soft stippled shading, the banners carry the words TILL I LOVED and I NEVER LIVED ENOUGH, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Traditional Thigh Cameo Portrait Rose Banner Man Woman Couple

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

Rain had got under the awning again, so I moved the tray of brooches onto an upturned crate and wiped the glass with my sleeve. Mr Abara from the fruit stall shouted across that I'd never sell anything in weather like this, and he was right, but nobody buys shell cameos in the sun either. People buy them when they want to feel they've been handed something.

Keep reading

The pair came in on a Thursday, wrapped in a carrier bag, two oval shell carvings no bigger than a thumbnail, both yellowed at the edges. Gerald Pask had carved them in 1923 for himself and his wife Ivy: a man in profile with his hair flattened by pomade and a bow tie at his throat, and her with a rose pinned above one ear and a net veil falling behind. Their granddaughter wanted them valued. She read out the wording on the little paper tags they'd been stored with, and then she laughed, the way you laugh at something you aren't sure you believe.

I told her the shell was sound and the carving clean, which was true. I did not tell her that the mould for the scrolled frame had been my grandfather's, or that I'd spent a whole winter as a boy learning to cut the lip of a cameo so the face would catch the lamplight. I gave her a figure. She took it in coins from a purse and slid the pair across the trestle to me.

After the market packed up I held them under my lamp and turned them until the two profiles faced each other across the pale rim of the shell. It struck me that he had made her the bigger promise, and she had been the one who got to keep it. The rain kept on at the awning. I put them in a tin lined with cotton and wrote on the card: Gerald and Ivy, for whoever keeps them next.