Colour traditional tattoos on a woman's leg and forearm, including a heart, a chrysanthemum and a skull, shown against white bedding.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional colour tattoos on legs and forearms

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A person lies on white bedding with their legs crossed and one arm raised, showing several tattoos. The designs include a red heart with a ribbon banner, a large red chrysanthemum, a skull with a flower, and a bird and leaves on the forearm. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated red, green and yellow fills give the work a classic traditional look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair in, love, and mind the gravy, because this one takes a while. Albert Tully kept a room above the chip shop on Marine Parade, and in the summer of 1931 he had a board of drawings pinned behind his chair that every lad off the trawlers wanted a piece of. Hearts with ribbons slung across them. Chrysanthemums as big as dinner plates. A skull with a flower tucked in its jaw, which Albert swore he'd copied from a dream about his mother.

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Nobody ever asked him to draw the bird. It came off the bottom of the board one wet Tuesday, a swallow with its wings half open, and it stayed there so long that Albert started to think it had been waiting for someone to take it. Then came Eddie Pratt, who had a girl called Nell on the Hastings train and a boat that never came back from the Dogger. Eddie wanted a heart with a banner. Albert asked what the banner should say, and Eddie said nothing, just leave it white, she'll know what it means.

Albert left it white. He filled the chrysanthemum red, the leaves green, the skull's flower yellow as a lemon drop, and he sat Eddie's arm on the bedspread to dry. Nell came up the stairs the following spring with a letter in her pocket and a bird of her own on her wrist, and when she saw that blank banner she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the landing.

Mind, that's not the end of it. The swallow is still on the board. Albert said it flew off the paper every night once the gas was lit, and in the morning there'd be a feather on the windowsill, red as a pillar box. Pass me that teapot, love, and don't you dare look at the wall.

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