Two bent legs lying on a bed showing an intricate ornamental filigree pattern running from the thigh down the calf, in a dark ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental filigree pattern across thigh and calf

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a pair of bent legs resting on a pale bed, with an intricate ornamental pattern running from the upper thigh down over the knee and calf. The pattern is made of interlocking curling lines and open cut-out style shapes, appearing dark against the skin. The shading is soft and the tones are warm, with the dark bedding and a patterned backdrop behind the legs.

Thigh Calf Ornamental Filigree Pattern Leg Swirl Scroll

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

Nobody buys lanterns in the rain, my mother used to say, so I sold them in the rain anyway. Mine stood on the trestle table in a row of six, brass shells punched so full of curls that the lamplight came through them like lace. Behind me the tarpaulins snapped and drummed, and the gutter ran brown with leaves past the fishmonger's crates.

Keep reading

Hollis Parr came every Saturday for a year and never bought one. He stood under my awning with his collar up and traced the pattern with one finger, not quite touching the metal, following the scroll from one cut-out to the next the way you'd read a word you couldn't pronounce. The rain dripped off his cap onto the brass and he never seemed to notice.

I asked him finally what it said. He said it said nothing at all. It was a pattern his grandfather had cut into an iron gate in Lancashire, a gate sold for scrap the year the mill closed. Hollis had drawn it from memory on the back of a bus ticket and carried the ticket in his wallet for forty years. 'I want it where I can carry it,' he said, and then he walked off into the wet without asking the price.

The next Saturday his space was empty except for a lantern wrapped in brown paper, with a note tucked under the string: 'Light the middle one. The rest is just holes.' I lit it that night in the back room, and the walls filled with a lattice of shadow, curling and open, and for a moment I could see the whole gate standing in the dark.