Seated person with bold traditional tattoos on the thigh and calf, including a red rose, a skull, a wolf head and a flower, with more tattoos on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional leg tattoos with skull and wolf

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person sits on concrete steps with legs crossed, showing many traditional-style tattoos on the thighs and calves. Motifs include a red and black rose, a skull, a wolf head, a flower, a bottle, an eye and a small figure with a red base. The outlines are bold and black, with solid black fill and red used in the roses and the lower figure, and the tattoos are spread across the leg in a loose, overlapping arrangement.

Traditional Thigh Calf Forearm Rose Skull Wolf head Flower Bottle Eye Owl Figure

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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

Put the kettle on, and mind the third step, it's been loose since the gale. Now, you want the tale of the Gull's Rest, or the one about the bottle? They're the same tale if you listen right.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Pell came down to Saltcombe with a sea chest and a wolf's head he'd cut on a jetty post, so the story goes. Nobody would sit for him. The fishwives thought his needles bad luck, and the lifeboat men said a man who drew skulls on sailors was asking the sea to collect. So he took to the back room of the Anchor, where the rum was cheap and the lamps burned low, and he inked whoever fell asleep first. A rose for a girl who'd waited ten years on the pier. An owl for the widow who sold the bait, because she never slept. An eye on the wrist of a customs man, so he'd always see who was lying.

The bottle was the last one he ever did. A boy called Matthias came in on a wet night, sixteen and certain he'd be drowned by morning, and asked for a ship in a bottle on his leg, because his father had built one and never come home. Tobias said he didn't do ships. He did a little red-based figure instead, and he set it so the bottle's neck caught the lamplight.

The boy went out on the grey boats at dawn. The Gull's Rest came in three days later with a dozen men aboard, and not one of them lost. When they asked who'd marked the lad, nobody could say, because Tobias had gone out on the ebb with his chest and left the needles on the bar. Matthias never sailed again. He kept the bottle, though, and if you pass the Anchor after dark, look for the lamp in the back window. That's Tobias, still counting who's asleep.