Traditional-style colour tattoo on a calf showing a moustached man with a blue linework tattooed torso, beside a shaded black rose with green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed man portrait and black rose on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a moustached man with short hair in a head-and-shoulders portrait, his torso covered in blue linework tattoos of flowers and ornaments. A shaded grey rose with dark green leaves and orange accents sits at the lower left, with a red wash behind the man's head. The bold outlines, flat colour and vintage-style imagery give it a traditional look, and the composition fills the limb from edge to edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wet on the bench. Tonight's is about the rose, because every story in this town gets round to a rose eventually. My grandfather, Tobias Crane, kept a booth on Queen's Dock in the hungry winter of 1931, with a paraffin lamp, a tin of blue ink and a sign that said nothing about prices. One night, just as he was locking up, a man came in out of the sleet with a napkin covered in flowers his mother had drawn for him years before. He wanted every one of them on his chest, and he had the money in coins, all of it sea-damp.

Keep reading

Tobias spent three winters on that chest. Each flower was a port, or a debt, or a name he would not say aloud. The moustache was the last thing he inked, and the man insisted on it being as stiff and proud as a Sunday coat. Then the man asked for a rose on his calf, and Tobias asked him why it had to be grey. He said a rose is black when you cannot afford red, and he would pay for the red when he came back. Tobias shaded the petals slow, put the green leaves in with orange where the lamplight would catch them, and washed red behind the head on the night the Alberta sailed without him.

The man never did come back for the red, so Tobias made the only choice he could. He left one small bead at the centre of the rose unshaded, bare skin and nothing else, so that a streetlamp would catch it on a wet night. My grandfather used to say a man should always carry one thing on him that shines when he walks home in the dark. Mind your glasses on the way out, and mind the step.

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