Small colour tattoo of a red and white striped top hat with black outlines on the inner ankle.

Striped top hat on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A small cartoon-style top hat with bold black outlines, red and white stripes and a white brim sits on the side of an ankle. The linework is solid and the stripes are flat colour with minimal shading. The tattoo is centred on a plain background of skin and dark upholstery, with the rest of the foot and leg partly visible.

Ankle Top hat Cartoon Hat

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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

Right, you'll want the good chair for this, because the story of the red and white hat is a long one and my knees have opinions. Out on Gannet Skerry there was a lighthouse, white with a red band round its middle, and a keeper called Ambrose Quill who wore a tall striped hat every single day, even to scrub the lamp glass. Nobody thought anything of it until the spring the wind came up from the south-west and snatched the hat clean off his head and sailed it out over the water like a small, cheeky boat.

Keep reading

Now the sea is no fool, and it does not keep what it is given. The hat bobbed past the rocks, past a herring boat, past a fisherman's dog who barked at it twice, and came to rest on the head of a ewe standing on the cliffs at Pennock Head, three miles off. The ewe, being a sensible animal, kept it on. Ambrose walked the whole cliff path to fetch it back, and the ewe looked at him the way a magistrate looks at a man who has come to court late and without his boots.

That's the bit folk get wrong. The ewe did not give it up. It struck a bargain instead: a sack of barley, a tune on the tin whistle, and a promise that the lamp would burn a little brighter every winter. Ambrose agreed, the ewe trotted off in her finery, and from that day the light on Gannet Skerry has been the brightest on the coast. Every boat coming home still sees a dark shape on the cliff at dusk, one striped hat bright against the grass, and the old men at the harbour nod and say the keeper's debt is paid.