Two legs covered in colourful traditional tattoos, including roses, a dagger, a heart and a bird, photographed from above in a bath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional tattoos covering both legs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows two legs, viewed from above, covered with dense traditional-style tattoos. Motifs include roses, a dagger, a heart, scissors, a bird and wave-like shapes, with bold black outlines and shading. Bright reds, greens and yellows sit alongside grey and black tones, and the legs fill most of the frame against a pale background.

Traditional Thigh Calf Rose Dagger Heart Scissors Bird Wave Flower Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had counted the pennies twice before she let the lodger's trunk go down the back stairs, and she was still counting them when the bell over the scullery door rang at six. Outside, the tide was coming in over the groynes, grey as pewter, and the gulls were quarrelling over the bins.

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Her lodger, Walter Crane, had paid for three weeks in advance and left a biscuit tin behind instead. It had a cracked lid and held tracing paper: roses with petals curled like shavings, a dagger wrapped in a banner, a pair of shears with a lark perched on one blade. Every sheet had a name pencilled in the corner. Ada knew none of them. She knew the shop at the end of the pier had burned down in the spring, and that Walter had been the only man who came out of it alive.

On the last page was a swallow carrying a heart in its beak, the heart split by a green wave. Someone had coloured it in with boot polish and what looked like sweet pea juice. Ada sat on the bottom stair with the page on her knee, thinking of the bills in her apron pocket and the empty room upstairs with its window full of sea.

She sent the tin to the Saltcombe jumble stall with a note: take what you like, but keep the swallow. The next morning a girl came to the door asking for a room, a roll of flash clutched under one arm, and Ada, who had counted everything twice all her life, let her in without asking the price.