Colourful rainbow scale pattern tattoo on the upper thigh, with soft pastel shading in pink, orange, yellow, green and blue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow scale pattern on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo of overlapping scales covering the outer upper thigh of a person wearing white underwear. Each scale is shaded in a gradient of pastel colours, with a lighter highlight near the top edge of each one. The pattern fades irregularly at its edges and spreads diagonally across the thigh.

Thigh Scale Rainbow Pattern

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

Mab Corrigan had been carrying the basket up the hill for three days when the wind finally turned round and blew the scales back at her. They came off the old wyrm the way leaves come off a birch, one at a time and then all at once, and every one caught the light differently. Pink from the hawthorn side, a green like pond water, a yellow like butter held up to a candle.

Keep reading

The castle at the top had been empty since the lord's sons went off to the sea. Its walls were half gone and ivy had taken the great hall, but the wyrm lay coiled in the cellar where the floor had fallen through, and it was not dead. It only wanted its skin back before the frost. Mab had made a bargain with it, the way her grandmother had bargained with bees: one bowl of milk for every scale, and every scale she gathered would be hers to keep.

She climbed down with the basket on her hip and counted them into the dark. Forty-one, she said. Forty-two, said the wyrm, and bared a tooth as long as a spade. On the last evening it had only one scale left, the blue one over its heart, and it asked her to take it. Mab shook her head and set down the final bowl. The wyrm drank, and the blue scale stayed where it was, and that was the first time in its long life it had been refused anything.

She carried the forty-two scales down the hill in the rain. At the bottom she hung them on red cords for the village children, and by the next summer the colours had run into the stone walls and the lanes, fading at the edges where the weather got in. The children still say that if you stand on the hill at dusk you can see the castle wearing its old skin, and that the blue scale is still there, pale as a vein, waiting for someone to ask.