Black and grey traditional tattoos on two legs, with a mask inside a floral ring on each knee, a rose and a snake on the thighs and a web pattern with flowers on the calves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional masks, roses and snake on legs

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs are covered in black and grey tattoos. Each knee has a mask inside a ring of leaves and flowers, and the thighs show a snake, a bold flower and a dagger-like motif. The calves carry a rose, a spider web pattern and more blackwork-style flourishes, with bold outlines and solid shading against a wooden floor.

Traditional Thigh Calf Mask Snake Rose Flower Leaves Web Dagger Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan,

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The barge is tied up below the lock at Hythe Cut and I have finally got the masks out of the hold. Dad wrapped them in oilcloth in March, the week the players left us owing two months' mooring, and they have sat under the coal sacks ever since. Two of them, carved and painted, one grinning with its cheeks pushed up and one with its mouth turned down like a wet sock. Mr Haskett says they came off a theatre in Bristol that burned, and the company paid them over instead of coin. Nobody can say if that is true.

I have been drawing them on the back of the ledger, the way you taught me, pencil first and then ink. The grinning one goes on the left of the page and the sad one on the right, because that is how they hang in the wheelhouse. Dad says a barge is only a house that floats, and a house wants its faces on the walls. I told him the faces are just wood and paint. He said so was the rose on your hand, and I did not argue with that.

Ruth from the Ellesmere boat came down yesterday with a grass snake in a jar she wanted me to look at. Harmless, she said, but the cold had cracked its scales into a web pattern, and she wants the same web on her shins that I put on the Hythe rope last winter. Her cousin wants a dagger wrapped in leaves. Everybody wants something of the water on them now.

So I am sending you the drawing of the grinning one, the one you liked best. Keep it on your sideboard where the light catches. I will bring the real mask when we pass Castleford in the spring, if the lock keeper stops charging me to go through.

Your loving granddaughter, Mae