Two legs in a bath covered in traditional style tattoos of red roses, a skull, a bicycle, a sun and a mask, on the thighs and calves.

Traditional leg sleeve with roses and skulls

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two legs rest in a bathtub covered in traditional tattoos, including several red and black roses, a skull, a bicycle wheel, a sun with a skull face and a small butterfly. The designs use bold black outlines with solid black shading and red and orange fills. The tattoos are spread down both legs with the roses placed as larger focal points on the thighs and calves.

Traditional Thigh Calf Rose Skull Bicycle Sun Butterfly Mask Script

Find an artist for this

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 last working bicycle on Tessaly Reach was kept in a flooded lock house, and the wheel was the first thing Mab Corrigan pulled out of the silt. Nobody on the dredging crew believed a wheel could still turn after two hundred years of salt, but she spun it with her palm and it hummed like something waking up. Ruth from the galley said bringing a relic back to the hulk was bad luck. Mab said luck was for people who had nothing left to fix.

Keep reading

The sun was the trouble. Old Hollis had a tin of mismatched ink from the pre-drowning markets, and the only colours left were rust, a brick red and a sooty black that smelled of burnt sugar. He sat Mab on an upturned crate by the reactor vent and worked the needle while the ship's bells rang the watch. She asked why the sun had a skull in its face. He said the sun was the only thing that came back every morning, and skulls were what it left behind once it had finished looking.

Roses went on next, two of them, heavy-petalled and black at the edges like wet cloth. Hollis insisted on the butterfly, small and rust-coloured, because it was the only creature in the old picture books that looked as though it had escaped from somewhere. The mask he refused to explain. It had sat on his shoulder for forty years, and he said it was a face he had borrowed from a man who never came back for it.

When the last line dried, Mab stood up on the crate and walked the length of the deck without touching the rail. The wheel was bolted to the bow now, turning slow in the sea wind. She told Ruth the ink would outlast the ship. Ruth said that was what everyone said about ships.