Close photograph of a small black Greek lettering tattoo on the upper thigh, beside red underwear and white striped thigh-high socks.

Small Greek letters on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of a person in red underwear and white thigh-high socks with navy stripes. A small black tattoo of three Greek capital letters sits on the outer upper thigh. The tattoo is solid and simply drawn, and the warm skin tones and red fabric dominate the frame.

Lettering Thigh Letter

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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 brass came in on Tuesday's tide, three letters no taller than a man's thumb, and Maud Pelham wanted them cut before the church bells. Nobody in Cromer had ever asked Harold Wick for Greek. He turned the blanks over in his palm, liked the cold weight of them, and sent the boy up to the damp shelf above the forge for the old alphabet book.

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The book set the letters out in a way no Englishman's eye expected, all sharp angles and little peaked roofs, like the tents of a camp pitched on a wreck. Delta, Sigma, Delta. Maud said they stood for three sisters who had sailed for Smyrna and never come home, and that she would say no more, so Harold did not ask. He filed the first edge true, then the second, working the sheltered points where a chisel wants to skid off the metal and bite the thumb.

By dusk the sisters were set into the lid of a sea chest, bright as new coins. Maud came back with a lamp and ran her thumb along the cuts, feeling for burrs. There were none. She paid him in shillings and a bottle of something sweet from Cyprus, and asked him to keep the spare triangle, the one he had shaved too thin to use.

Harold carried that offcut in his waistcoat pocket for the rest of his working life. When customers asked what it was, he said it was a small mistake that had turned out to fit.