Two coloured neo-traditional tattoos on the upper thighs, a skull in a red-striped astronaut helmet on the left and a vintage brass diving helmet with a pocket watch on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull astronaut and diving helmet on thighs

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on the upper thighs, with dark shorts visible above and a brick wall behind. The left design shows a skull inside a grey helmet with a red stripe, flanked by red four-point stars and a dark suit with round fittings. The right design is a vintage diving helmet with a round porthole, brass rivets and bolts, and a pocket watch dial near the bottom, all shaded in greys with orange and red accents.

Neo-trad Thigh Skull Star Pocket watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The helmet came up from the Shoal in a fish crate packed with wet straw, and Mrs Agnes Pryce, who had sold chipped teapots on Quay Street for forty years, knew at once it was not the sort of thing a sensible woman kept. Its brass collar was green at the seams. Someone had wired a pocket watch to the breastplate, the glass gone milky, the hands stopped at twenty to four.

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Her grandson Tobias, nine years old and already building rockets out of sherry bottles, came in from school and stared at it for a long time. 'That's a deep-sea one,' he said. 'Like the man on the calendar at the chippy.' Agnes did not remember any calendar, but she remembered the lighthouse keeper's boy who had gone out to the wreck in the winter of sixty-two and never come up, and how his father had hung a painted space helmet above the bar of the Anchor afterwards, a dome with a red band, because the boy had wanted to go to the moon and the sea had got to him first.

Tobias lifted the brass helmet with both hands and looked through the cracked porthole at the window. 'You can see the harbour wall from down here,' he said, and when Agnes looked, she could see nothing but the wet grey glass and her own face, very old. He asked if he could wind the watch. She let him. The little hand gave a click, then another, and the second hand, which had not moved in sixty years, started to tick towards the lamps coming on along the quay.

That evening the tide turned early, and the boats swung round on their ropes, and Agnes sold nothing at all, not even a teapot with a chip in the spout. She sat in the back room with the helmet on the table between them, listening to the watch keep time, until Tobias fell asleep with his head on his arms and the glass of the porthole still clouded with his breath.