Colour and grey tattoo of an ornate oval mirror with red script reading Create Yourself, a red lipstick and a shaded grey rose, on the calf.

Mirror, rose and lipstick on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

An ornate oval mirror with a decorative top crest frames red script reading "Create Yourself", with a red lipstick lying across its lower left edge. A shaded grey rose sits at the lower right of the mirror, with soft grey tones in the petals and frame. The tattoo is on the lower leg against a pink background, and the composition is centred on the mirror.

Realism Lettering Calf Mirror Rose Lipstick Script Frame

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 function room of the Crown Hotel in Walsall smells of carpet shampoo and warm prosecco, and the name badges are still in a shoebox by the door. You peel off your own, the one with the photo from 1998, and go and stand in front of the oval mirror in the ladies' cloakroom. Its carved crest is so ornate it must have come from someone's nan's hallway. Somebody has left a red lipstick on the ledge beneath it, the cap off, the bullet worn down to a blunt slope.

Keep reading

Fenella Marsh comes in behind you with a tissue balled in one fist and a face that hasn't decided yet whether to cry. She sat behind you in Maths for five years and once drew a rose on the back of your planner in biro. She looks at you in the glass, then at the lipstick. "Thirty years and you still look like you're about to get told off," she says. You tell her you were never the one who got told off. She laughs, and it's the same laugh she used to hide behind her hand.

She nods at the glass. Across the bottom third of it, in red letters that have faded to the colour of old brick, someone has written CREATE YOURSELF. "Sixth form common room," she says. "Before the leavers' dance. Mr Pargeter had the caretaker try for a whole term to get it off, and it never came." You remember the girl who wrote it, a fourth-former who wore her sister's coat, and who later moved to Leeds and was never heard from again.

You pick up the lipstick. It's still soft enough to turn. Under the old words you write your own name, small and careful, then press the cap back on and set it down exactly where you found it. Fenella watches you in the glass and, for the first time all evening, she doesn't look away.