Two raised legs covered in traditional style tattoos of roses, skulls and banners, with a large rose on the calf and a foot tattoo near the ankle.

Tattooed legs with roses and skulls

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two raised legs are covered in tattoos of roses, skulls, banners and a few smaller motifs, with a foot tattoo visible on the upper foot. The linework is bold and the designs are shaded in grey and black, with the roses and some details picked out in red. The bare skin is set against a plain pale wall, and the frame shows the legs from the feet up to the denim shorts.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the cabin step, the lot of you, and mind the rope. You'll have heard that Ada Pinder could paint a rose on a narrowboat so true the bees came to it. That's the truth. What they don't tell you is what she did when the canal froze solid one February and the coal boats stopped moving.

Keep reading

She had a cabin full of paint tins and nothing to sell. So she took the old flash sheets her father had kept from the fairground, roses with their petals curled like tongues, skulls grinning out of ribbon scrolls, a banner with a name nobody could read any more, and she traced them onto every scrap of tin and board she owned. She painted them red for the roses, grey for the bones, black for the shadow underneath, and nailed them to the cabin roof so every boat passing would see.

The trouble started in March, when the ice broke and a lad from Braunston came through with a load of coal and no money to pay for it. He stopped under her roof and stared up at the skulls a long while. "Those aren't for boats," he said. "Those are for keeping." Ada, who had never once thought of her paintings as anything but paint, said, "Then keep one," and handed him a brush.

The story goes that he kept his skull on the stern of that boat for forty years, and when they pulled him out of the cut at Rugby, the rose on his cabin door was still wet with the same red she'd mixed that winter. Don't ask me how a painted thing stays wet. Ask the bees.

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