Traditional style colour tattoo of a grey mouse in a red cape holding a stick, beside a hanging lantern, a cockroach and purple blossoms, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mouse warrior with lantern and flowers on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A grey mouse wearing a red cape and a skull-like helmet holds a stick, with a cockroach perched above it and a red paper lantern hanging with feathers from a pole. Purple and yellow five-petal flowers and loose petals frame the design. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in red, yellow, grey and purple give it a classic colour look, with the design filling a vertical area of the leg.

Traditional Thigh Mouse Lantern Feather Flower Petal Cape Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mouse had been told the cockroach was a poor guard, but Pell had never trusted anyone who could survive a flood, so when the lantern began to swing from the old willow at the edge of Thornwick, he took the stick from the hedge and went out to meet whatever was coming up the lane.

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Nothing came up the lane. What came instead was Ada Brisk from the mill, carrying a basket of windfall plums and complaining loudly that the lantern hook had been put up crooked. She set the basket on the stile, looked at Pell in his beaked skull helmet and his red cape, and asked him whether he intended to fight the plums. Pell said he intended to fight whatever had been lighting the lantern at night and making the flowers bloom out of season along the verge. Ada said that was her, and that the flowers were the hedge-rose cuttings her late mother had planted, and that the lantern was for the badgers who came to the mill steps on wet nights and had nowhere else to be seen by.

The cockroach, which had been listening from the top of the pole with great dignity, climbed down onto Pell's helmet and settled there. Pell sighed. He had come to slay something, and instead he was being asked to hold a basket. He lifted it onto his shoulder, cape flapping in the thin wind, and walked her back to the mill with the lantern swinging light across the petals on the road.

By morning the story had grown in the village the way such stories do, and by evening the mouse was the warrior of Thornwick, which he accepted with a small bow to nobody in particular.