Colour realism tattoo of a gaunt, pale face with yellow eyes framed by rusted metal straps, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pale creature portrait in a metal frame on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A detailed portrait of a gaunt, pale figure with long dark hair and yellow eyes, set behind rusted riveted metal straps. The shading is smooth and realistic, with scratches and wrinkles picked out on the skin. Warm orange and yellow wash behind the figure contrasts with the grey and purple tones of the metal and face, and the design fills the thigh.

Realism Thigh Creature Portrait Rivet Long hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are counting the bolts again when the lamps along the midway go the colour of marmalade in the rain. Mr Harrow has told you twice not to touch the frame before the last crowd leaves, but the straps have worked loose on the left side, and if the iron shifts while she leans against it, the whole thing will ring across the field like a bell. So you take the spanner from your back pocket and tighten the nut, and the thing behind the bars watches you do it with yellow eyes.

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The board outside calls her the Hollow Madonna, though nobody who pays a shilling to see her ever asks her name. She came to the fair in a cattle truck from a workhouse up near Lincoln, Harrow says, and she was thin then and has been thinner every season since. You bring her a tin cup of cold tea and she takes it through the gap in the straps without touching your fingers. She knows the sound of your spanner. She knows you are the one who keeps the generator going when it sputters.

Tonight she asks you how many bolts hold the frame. You tell her eight, then ten, because the true number is nine and you don't want her counting. She makes a sound close to laughter, and the scratches on her cheek pull tight. Then she says the rivets are the only honest thing in the whole show, because they show you exactly where the metal was joined and hide nothing.

Harrow's whistle goes at midnight. The crowd thins, the cage is wheeled behind the caravans into the dark, and you leave the spanner hooked on the lowest strap, where anyone quick and brave could reach it. In the morning it is gone. The field is empty except for the sunrise lying orange on the wet grass, and one bolt in the mud, its head turned towards the road.