Legs covered in colour traditional tattoos including a tiger head and a rose on the thigh and calf, shown in denim shorts outdoors.

Traditional tattoos covering legs

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A standing figure wears denim shorts while both legs are covered in tattoos from thigh to ankle. Designs include a tiger head, a rose, animal heads, stars and smaller motifs in bold black outlines. Colour ink in red, yellow and green dominates, with some grey shading, against a soft-focus background of yellow flowering shrubs.

Traditional Thigh Calf Ankle Forearm Tiger Rose Star Animal head Lettering Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who fills the water bowl in winter quarters now, because the fuel man stopped answering in March and Mr Abernathy has taken to sleeping in the ticket wagon with his boots on. The big top has been folded since the autumn. It smells of wet canvas and old sawdust, and Solomon, the tiger, watches you haul the buckets across the frost with the flat yellow patience of an animal who remembers better money.

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There was a time the whole show ran on nerve and rosewater. Ruby Dunmore painted the rose on the caravan door herself, red petals edged in black, and the stars across the ticket booth were meant to bring luck to anyone who paid a shilling to walk beneath them. Now the paint blisters in the rain and the stars have faded to grey. Nobody comes down Stillwater Lane to see the snarling heads and the sailor's swallows any more. They come to sit in the cold and wait for something to be other than what it is.

On the last night you unlatch the cage and leave the door swinging. Solomon steps out onto the wet straw as if he has been invited, pads past the empty benches and sits in the one lamp that still works. He does not roar. He studies the stars on the booth for a long while, then turns to look at you, and you understand he is waiting for you to take a bow.

So you do. You tip the last of the water over the stones, walk out into the lamplight with your hands open at your sides the way Ruby used to, and the one tiger in England who never learned to be sad keeps his gold eyes on the gate, as if the audience were finally arriving.