Solid black tattoo of a silhouetted figure with a flowing ribbon inside a circle, on the outer lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette figure in a circle on a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a figure holding a long ribbon or rod is set inside an open black circle, with the ribbon trailing around the outline. The linework is bold and filled with even black ink, with no shading or greys. The tattoo sits centrally on the outer lower leg against plain skin, with a shoe and dark trousers visible at the edges of the frame.

Calf Silhouette Figure Circle Ribbon Hoop

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

Brother Anselm had rung the bell at Saint Odo's for forty winters and his hands had grown too stiff for the rope. So the prior sent for the girl from the mill road, the one who spun ribbon for the fair. She came up the hill with a length of red silk over her shoulder and a hoop of ash wood under her arm, and she laughed at the walls, which nobody had done in years.

Keep reading

The abbot did not like her. He said a woman in the bell loft would bring the devil into the bells. She said the devil had never once needed a bell to find her. Each morning she climbed the stair before the office and threw the silk through the hoop, and each morning it came back to her hand, and the monks in the lower cloister swore they heard the bell answer before she pulled the rope at all.

In the third week of Lent the snow shut the valley road and a boy went missing on the fell. Nobody could see the path. The girl carried the hoop out to the gate, stood it upright in the drift, and began to turn the silk through it, slow and then faster, the ribbon flicking out and curling back like a trout in the current. The monks watched from the wall. Far off, a small light answered, then another, and the boy came down the white slope following the loop of red through the dark.

The abbot wrote nothing about it in the chronicle. He had the hoop hung on the nail beside the bell rope, and it is still there, the old men say, though no one has thrown silk through it since. Nobody on the fell ever got lost again.