Black and grey traditional tattoos covering a bent leg, including a skull with a Before Dishonor banner, a swallow, a peacock and a pin-up head on the lower thigh.

Traditional leg sleeve with skulls and swallows

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two bent legs covered in black and grey tattoos resting on a dark leather surface. The designs include a skull with a Before Dishonor banner, a swallow, a peacock, flowers, a panther and a pin-up head in a headscarf above a skull with parachute wings. The bold outlines and solid black fills are set against lighter skin, with the composition filling the frame from top to bottom.

Traditional Thigh Calf Skull Swallow Peacock Flower Banner Pin-up Panther Dagger Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud, the pass has been shut since Tuesday, so this will go down with the mule train or not at all. Mr Adair at the telegraph hut says the snow will hold until the thaw, and he says it the way he says everything, as though reading from a card. I have kept the lamp lit in the back room, the one with the curtain Eddie hung for me, and the girl he painted on the cupboard door is still smiling at the kettle.

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The parachute men came over the ridge on Thursday, eleven of them, kitbags strapped across their chests like bandoliers. One of them, a lad called Pike with a skull stitched onto his cap, asked whether we had any cards left. I told him the only card in Hallow Gap is the one the postmaster keeps for the dead. He laughed the way boys do before they learn what the word means, and he left a shilling under the sugar bowl.

They went before first light, the sky the colour of a swallow's back, and took the cut-through toward the old quarry. I watched the last of them drop off the crest into the cloud like coins down a well. Someone had written a line of words on a tin box in the hut, something about honour going before the rest of you, and I have decided not to ask who wrote it.

Keep the photograph of Eddie safe. If the post gets through, tell me whether the peacock still hangs over the bar at the Crown, and whether anyone has finally collected the shilling.

Yours, Vera