Colour realism tattoo of a woman in an ornate headdress and draped veil, placed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate woman portrait on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A detailed portrait of a woman wearing an ornate, jewelled headdress and a flowing draped veil fills the upper thigh. The face and headdress use smooth, soft shading, while the veil and background are rendered with looser, painterly strokes. Warm browns and ambers dominate, with teal accents and touches of turquoise scattered through the design.

Realism Thigh Woman Portrait Headdress Veil Ornament Jewel

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

You learn the locks before you learn the river, and by the time you can work the paddles alone your hands know the weight of the gates better than your own name. Aunt Ida's barge, the Sable Wren, carries coal up the Ouse to a mill past Naburn, and beneath her bunk she keeps a headdress wrapped in oilcloth, the sort of thing a travelling showman might press on a woman in a generous mood. On a wet afternoon you unwrap it. The jewels catch the lamplight like shallow water, and a veil of old silk slides out after them, brown as stewed tea, its edges stitched with teal thread gone the colour of a kingfisher's back.

Keep reading

Ida tells you it belonged to Serafina, who worked the ferry at Bishopthorpe before the bridge was built. Each dusk she crossed with the veil over her shoulders, and every bargeman in the reach touched his cap as she passed, though nobody could say why. You try it on in the cabin mirror. The silk trails the floorboards like a wake, and the reflected woman looks back at you with a stillness you do not recognise as your own.

In March the river comes up brown and fast, and one night the Wren drags her anchor toward the weir. Ida's hands shake too badly to hold the boathook. You take the veil from its nail, knot it at your throat, and stand at the tiller with the stones showing grey through the spray. On the far bank a man with a lantern lifts his arm, the way the ferry crews once did, and you steer by his light until the bow finds slack water.

At dawn you hang the headdress back on its nail. One jewel is gone, and wedged in the silk where it used to sit is a bead of teal glass, still warm from your hand, which Ida swears was never there before.