Neo-trad style tattoo of a blue and teal lobster with patterned fill and black outlines, on a person's calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate blue lobster on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large lobster is tattooed on the calf, seen from above with its claws spread and antennae rising past the top of the design. Bold black outlines frame the body, and the interior is packed with mandala-like patterns in teal, light blue and grey. Blue and turquoise dominate the colour palette, and the design fills the frame against a white paper towel and dark background.

Neo-trad Calf Antennae Claw Ornamental

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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

Brother Anselm to Prior Hugh, from the scriptorium at Holm, with apologies for the margin of the Carlisle psalter. You wrote that the borders were for vines and a little grotesque, not for a creature that walks backward out of the sea. I agree. But Brother Osric's last cart brought a full jar of ultramarine, and it seemed a sin to spend it all on a Virgin's mantle when the bottom of the jar was still blue enough to be a shame to leave.

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The lobster was drawn from life. The cook fetched a live one from the fish-wives at the harbour and kept it in a bucket beside the kitchen door until I had sketched its claws, which it held up at me in a way I found personal. I outlined the body in iron-gall ink, as firm as I could make it, then filled every plate of its shell with petals, rings and small staring eyes, because the ridges on the carapace looked to me like the tiles of a chapter house roof. The woad went on in three washes, from dark teal at the head to a pale, almost grey blue at the tail. The antennae would not fit on the vellum, so they run past the top edge and into the bare board of the cover. I hope the binder forgives me.

When Abbot Edric came in for vespers he stood over my desk so long that the bell had to be rung twice. Then he asked whether the creature had been blessed. I said it had been boiled, which is not the same. He laughed until he had to sit down on Osric's stool. He has ordered that the page stay open in the case by the window, so the novices can see it when they come to copy.

The cook sends his regards and asks, very politely, for a live one for the feast of Saint Brendan. I have told him the lobsters are now in the psalter and he will have to find his own.