Black and grey photo of a bold blackwork pistol tattoo on the side of an upper thigh, with hands holding fabric at the top of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pistol tattoo on the upper thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black handgun outline is tattooed on the side of the upper thigh, shown in a black and white photograph. The design uses flat, heavy black fills with thin negative-space lines defining the grip, slide, trigger guard and barrel. The skin is pale and the tattoo fills much of the frame, with a person's hands and loose fabric visible at the top edge.

Blackwork Thigh Pistol Gun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, and mind the tin on the step, it holds the last of the tea. Nobody aboard the Mercy Ann spoke of the pistol Dunstan Hale kept wrapped in oilcloth beneath his bunk. Forty years he hauled coal up the Oxford cut and never once fired it, though every lock-keeper from Braunston to Thrupp knew it was there, the way you know a pike lies still under the lily pads.

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The winter the ice came early, a lock-keeper's boy climbed aboard with frozen fingers and a grievance. Men had stolen his father's windlass, he said, and he wanted the gun to frighten them off. Dunstan poured him a cup of cocoa thick enough to stand a spoon in, then unwrapped the oilcloth on the table between them. The boy stared at the black shape lying there, all solid fill and thin pale lines where the grip and slide ought to be, and said it looked like something a child would draw on a wet afternoon.

Dunstan laughed until he coughed. Then he slid out the empty magazine and held it up to the lamp. Every cartridge had gone into the river the year his wife died, when he decided he had no use for noise. What he kept was the outline. The men with the windlass, he told the boy, feared a stubborn face more than any barrel, and by morning the windlass was back on its hook at the lock. The boy went home with cocoa in his belly and the shape of that gun burning behind his eyes.