Two raised legs in red Converse trainers show bold traditional tattoos on the calves, including a butterfly, a rose, a spider and a ship's wheel.

Traditional leg tattoos with red Converse trainers

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two legs are raised against a plain cream wall, wearing maroon Converse high-tops. The calves are covered in traditional-style tattoos with thick black outlines, including a butterfly, a rose, an eye, a spider, a panther head, a ship's wheel and a spade-shaped panel with a sunset. Red, yellow, green and grey fills sit alongside black, and script lettering runs along the shins.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Mind the step, it's loose," Dad said, so I minded it, carrying the paraffin lamp down into the net store where the herring crew had left their sea chests for winter. Nobody had opened Tomasz Kerr's chest since October. The padlock had rusted shut, and the ship's wheel scratched into its lid had gone green in the grooves.

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Dad prised the hasp with a chisel while I held the light. Inside, folded in greaseproof paper, were flash sheets Kerr had drawn himself in pencil and then gone over in ink: a swallow with a banner, a panther's head snarling at nothing, a rose with thorns like tally marks, a spider sitting in the middle of its web. Dad said Kerr used to have them inked at a barber's back room in Grimsby, one mark for every port he came home to. He never let the artist do the sunset in the spade. He wanted that done in Eyemouth, where he could see the real one from his mother's window.

Under the sheets was a single drawing of a spade shape, outlined in black and nothing else. On the back, in the same careful hand: Leave the sun for me. I'll fill it when the wheel comes round again. The crew had sailed without him in November, and there was no word of him since. Dad folded the paper back the way it had been and didn't say anything for a while.

We carried the chest upstairs to the cottage, and I set the lamp on the table beside it. The light caught the green spokes of the wheel and made them look almost wet. I traced the empty spade with my thumb, and the paper was cold and smelt of tar, the way every sailor's thing in this village always does.

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