Two colour tattoos on the thighs: a ribcage wrapped in yellow and grey flowers on the left, and an anatomical heart with a mountain landscape on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage and heart thigh tattoos

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two thigh tattoos sit side by side. The left shows a black and grey ribcage framed by yellow and grey-green flowers and leaves, with bold outlines and soft shading. The right shows an anatomical heart whose interior holds a colourful landscape of mountains, pine trees and a low sun, with the bone-like top of the heart in grey.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Ribcage Flower Leaves Heart Landscape Mountain Tree Sunset Bone

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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 lorry's engine has been dead since October, and you are the only one still sleeping under the canvas of the empty big top. Mr Abelard Quaife, who ran the Quaife & Sons Travelling Show for forty years, left you the keys to the caravan and a cardboard box marked WINTER, FRAGILE. Inside, wrapped in a yellowed lace petticoat, is a papier-mâché ribcage painted with marigolds, the one the skeleton act used before the real bones were sold to a museum in Leeds.

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Every evening you carry it out to the fence post behind the hay barn and set it facing the lane, so the village children who come to peer at the sagging ticket tent can see something still worth a penny. Nobody pays now. You sit on an upturned crate and talk to the ribs about the weather, the price of feed, and the way the Shropshire hills turn violet before the lamps come on in the farmhouses.

In February a letter arrives from the council. The field is to be ploughed for a solar farm by Easter. You read it twice, then take the ribcage back into the caravan and sit with it on your knees. Quaife once told you a heart is only a pump until someone paints a country inside it. You find the old tin of pigments in the drawer under the stove, and the sunset colour he always mixed for the lake where the show first wintered, a green that looked almost blue in the rain.

You paint one last valley onto the breastbone, small and careful, with a pine line along the ridge and a low sun sitting just above the ribs. When the lorries finally pull out, the ribcage rides in the back with the lace folded around it, and somewhere past the county line you lift the corner of the cloth and see the hills still burning gold in the dark.