Two bare feet on a sheepskin rug, with a colour traditional-style face and flower tattoo on one ankle and a red and grey rooster tattoo on the other.

Rooster and face tattoos on bare ankles

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a long-pile sheepskin rug, each with a tattoo on the ankle and top of the foot. The left ankle shows a pink and red face with a pink flower and green leaves, drawn with bold dark outlines. The right ankle shows a rooster head in red, grey and black with fine feather detail, and the toenails are painted bright red.

Traditional Ankle Face Flower Leaves Rooster Feet

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

Pull your chair closer, the kettle's only just singing, and the lorries can wait on the far side of the wire. My grandmother kept a red cockerel at the frontier post at Selka Mill, a bird with grey-feathered shoulders like a pewter spoon and a comb the colour of a boiled sweet. He would not crow at dawn like a decent creature. He crowed when a lorry was halfway across the line, and the guards learned to hold their stamps until he had finished.

Keep reading

One wet March a woman came over on foot with a tin tray under her arm, painted with a pink face and a ring of violets and green leaves. The officer, a thin man called Tomas Bell, asked what she was carrying. She said bread, and he believed her, because she had the kind of hands that did not lie about bread. The cockerel sat on the gatepost and watched her the way a magpie watches a button.

Tomas lifted the tray to check underneath, and the cockerel let out such a shout that the wire rang. Every guard turned. Every dog in the village answered. Tomas stood there with his hands full of tin and his mouth open, and the woman laughed for the first time all morning.

He stamped her paper without reading it. Later, my grandmother said, he was seen at the bakery buying violets for his own kitchen window, though nobody could say who had asked him to. Put your cup down now. That is the whole of it, and the bird is still on the gatepost if you doubt me.