Close crop of a person in coral underwear showing a large colour tattoo of princess characters in an ornate frame on the thigh, and a small black symbol on the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Princess scene on thigh and small symbol on hip

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The image shows a close crop of a torso and upper thigh in coral underwear on a light bed. A large colour tattoo on the thigh depicts several cartoon princess characters inside an ornate scrolled frame, with shaded and outlined figures. A small black line tattoo of a symbol sits on the hip above the waistband.

Thigh Other Cartoon character Ornate frame Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had the paint tin open before the van doors were properly down, and by dusk the whole fairground smelled of linseed and fried onions. Her father wanted the frame done before the Bank Holiday crowds came in off the pier. Four princesses, he said, in a scroll of gilt, the way they'd been on the old carousel at Rhyl before the fire took it. Ruth had never seen the carousel. She had only seen the bits her father drew for her on the back of a betting slip.

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She painted the princesses first, because a frame will forgive a bad face but a face will not forgive a bad frame. The fair folk came to watch. Mr Gaffney from the coconut shy said the one in blue looked like his sister who ran off to Liverpool with a drummer. Ruth gave her a crooked smile and a pearl the size of a pea. In the bottom corner, below the scroll, she scratched a small mark with the wrong end of a brush: a key with a notch missing, the sign her father used on every bill he ever pasted.

The Bank Holiday came in wet. The coconut shy sat empty, the hoopla men played cards in the lee of the waltzer, and on the Monday a tall lad in a wool coat stood in front of the board for an hour and never bought a ticket. When the rain eased he asked who had painted the blue princess's hem. Ruth said her father had, which was a lie, and he nodded as though he already knew.

Years later the board hung in a pub in Sheffield, then in a junk shop, then in a flat above a launderette where a lodger traced the notched key with one finger and asked nobody in particular what it opened. Ruth never saw it again. The gilt scroll, her father used to say, was the only part of any fair worth keeping, because it was the only part that stayed put while everything else packed up and drove away.