Black linework tattoos of a pistol and an assault rifle on a pale lower leg, with the rifle running up the outer side of the second leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pistol and rifle outlines on both legs

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two lower legs, seen from the front against a dark car seat. A pistol outline with a banded holster detail sits on the left leg, and a long rifle outline with a magazine and stock runs up the right leg. The tattoos are drawn in black outline with minimal shading, and the pale skin gives strong contrast.

Calf Pistol Gun

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

The barge Patience came down the Sorrow Cut in the wet month of March, low in the water with coal and two long guns wrapped in oilcloth under the hatch boards. Nobody on the towpath asked what they were for, which was how Ansel Crewe liked things.

Keep reading

At Hebble Lock the keeper's daughter, Mab, rowed out to take the toll and saw the shape of the pistol pressed through the cloth. "What do they shoot?" she asked. "Nothing that breathes," Ansel said, and he meant it. The old law of the cut said any man who carried iron past the lock had to leave it as a pledge until he had paid his way home, and these had been pledged by a drover who never came back to claim them.

Years passed. The river rose one winter and took the lock gate in a single night, and the keeper's house went with it. Mab, grown and stubborn, waded out to the barge with a lantern. Ansel unwrapped the pistol and the rifle and laid them on the deck, and she saw that the barrels had rusted shut and the stocks were packed with river silt. "They're no good now," she said. "No," Ansel said, "but they're heavy, and heavy things hold a rope."

They tied the rifle to the drowned gate, weighted the line with the pistol, and the barge hauled the new timbers into their slot before dawn. Ansel kept the oilcloth, and Mab kept the toll book, and in the margin beside the drover's name she wrote: paid.