Two colour tattoos on a person's thighs: a ribcage wrapped in orange and blue flowers on the left, and an anatomical heart filled with a forest and sunset landscape on the right, in a neo-traditional

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage with flowers and a landscape heart on thighs

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on the thighs of a person wearing black star-print shorts. The left design shows a shaded grey ribcage entwined with orange and pale blue flowers and green leaves, with bold outlines and smooth tonal shading on the bones. The right design is an anatomical heart with grey, bone-like top sections and a landscape inside it, featuring rolling hills, pine trees and a low sun, in mostly muted greens and browns.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Ribcage Flower Heart Landscape Forest Hill Sun Leaves Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass the biscuit down before the cook takes it back, and sit where the lamp can reach your face, because I'm not telling this to the wall. You want to know why Mags Ellery never sailed again after the Lady Ansel rounded the Horn? Then hush, and listen to the rest of it.

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Off the Falklands, in a season of fog, the bosun found a whale's ribcage washed up on the shingle, bleached white as a church pew. Nobody wanted it aboard. Mags wanted it. She had a way of wanting the things other folk walked past. She knelt in the wet with her sleeves rolled and found that the bones had caught wild flowers in their gaps, blue ones with papery petals and orange ones like little lanterns, all growing out of the rib-shadows where the birds had dropped their seed. She cut three stems and wrapped them in oilcloth.

Her heart she kept in a different place. Years earlier, in Whitby, an old carver had shaped a lump of jet into a heart, and in its hollow he had painted a valley: rolling hills, pines dark as ink, a low sun sinking behind the ridge, and a river where her brother had gone under the ice when they were children. She wore it on a cord. Some nights, below deck, she held it to the lamp and walked the path in her mind, down through the pines to the water.

When we raised the Mersey, the cook swore he saw her laughing. She had the three stems standing in a tin of wet sand on the rail, and every one had opened. She turned the jet heart over in her palm, looking at that small sun, and said the only thing I ever heard her say about it. "Some things you carry, and some things carry you home."