Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate thigh tattoos in black and grey

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photo is taken from above and shows two large tattoo designs, one on each thigh. The left design features a woman's profile surrounded by swirling ornamental scrolls, and the right design shows a figure with flowing hair within a similar decorative frame. The linework is dense and detailed, with shading in grey on a black and white image, and the tattoos fill most of the frame against tiled flooring.

Thigh Woman Profile Scrollwork Figure

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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

The panels came out of the back parlour the week the snow shut the lane, wrapped in a horse blanket that still smelt of the byre. My uncle Walt had carved them himself, he said, sometime before the war, though nobody in the family had ever seen him hold a chisel. Two oak panels, each the length of my forearm, each a woman set inside a nest of curling leaves. The left one looked away over her shoulder. The right one had hair that ran off the wood in long grooves, like water finding its way downhill, and I spent the first evening with a torch trying to count the strands.

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I was meant to be clearing the loft, not reading the grain. But the frost came in through the slates and the paraffin heater ticked all night, and by the third night I had worked out that the scrolls on the left panel were not decoration. Every curl ended in a small notch, and when I held the lamp low and read the notches in order they spelled letters. R, O, S, E. Then a gap. Then the hair of the right-hand woman, which I had taken for hair, broke into short strokes that followed the same pattern.

On the thaw day I drove them to the village in the back of Dai Pritchard's van and showed them to the woman at the post office. She didn't know any Rose, but she made a telephone call, and within the hour a man came out of the house behind the shop with a magnifying glass and a flask of tea. He turned the panels over, tapped the back of the right one twice, and a thin drawer slid out of the oak with a letter folded inside, addressed in pencil to whoever found the ballroom doors.

I never read the letter. I hung the left panel above the workbench, where the lamp catches the notches, and I left the other one face down in the loft, so the hair could go on running in the dark.