A fresh red and black ornamental tattoo on a calf, being worked on with a tattoo machine by a tattooist in white gloves.

Red and black ornamental tattoo being inked on a calf

Geometric · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A tattooist in white gloves works with a tattoo machine on a leg, adding a large ornamental design. The centrepiece is a red star-like flower with intricate black and grey filigree patterns, framed by thick black bands that wrap around the leg. Black and grey shading fills the background, and the skin around the work shows some blood, with a wipe in the lower foreground.

Geometric Calf Flower Mandala Ornament Band

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 big top had lost its middle pole in the spring, and by June the canvas sagged over the sawdust like a sail with no wind. Old Tobias Rell kept the takings in a tin under the bunk and counted the people who still came through the gate: eleven on Monday, six on Tuesday, and on Wednesday only a girl with a tin whistle who asked whether the bears were asleep.

Keep reading

The tinker who came up the lane that week had a kit of needles in a rosewood box and a pot of red ink made from crushed rowan berries and soot. He said the trouble with a show was that it had no mark for people to follow. Rell laughed, and then he stopped laughing. He rolled up his trouser leg on the wagon step, and the tinker worked from the knee down for three nights, inking a flower with eight red petals, each edged in black filigree, then bands wrapped round the shin like the rings on a bell rope.

On the fourth morning the gate swung open on its own. People came up the lane following the red star across the fields, because a man with a mark on him is a map if you stand close enough to read it. They brought bread and lamp oil and a cousin's fiddle. By autumn the big top had its pole back, carved from a larch the tinker split for them.

Rell never let the last petal be finished. Every spring he sits on the wagon step while the girl with the whistle steadies his ankle and the tinker's grandson adds one more fine line, and he tells anyone who asks that a circus is only as big as the mark it can still take.