Two bare lower legs raised in burgundy boots, showing traditional tattoos of a bow, camera, rose, ship's wheel, playing card and small script on the calves.

Traditional tattoos on both calves

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two bare lower legs are raised against a plain pale wall, wearing burgundy lace-up boots and black socks. The left leg carries a bow, a camera and a rose, while the right leg shows a playing card with an eye, a heart and a ship's wheel, plus a short line of script running down the shin. The bold outlines and solid fills are in red, yellow, green and black, arranged in a balanced, flat composition.

Traditional Calf Bow Camera Rose Ship's wheel Playing card Eye Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick with frost, and sit where the lantern can reach your face, for I'll not tell this one to the dark. Rosalind Pike had the wheel that January, the brass one her father had polished so long the spokes went soft at the edges. She swore on it she would take the Mercy Anne through Hatch Lock before the cut froze shut. Nobody had ever tried it in that month. Her mother said it couldn't be done, and her mother was right about most things, which was the trouble with her.

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Her brother Tobias came along to keep the ropes tidy and his mouth shut, which he did neither of. He carried a camera in a scuffed case and photographed everything that moved: the lock keepers at their tea, the swans, the red ribbon Rosalind had tied to the bow for luck. On the cabin door he had painted a playing card, the ace of spades, with an eye in the middle where the pips should be. He said it was to keep watch on the water. When the ice began to sing against the hull, he lifted his camera and pointed it at nothing at all, and said that was how you knew it was real.

At the lock the gates were iced to their beams. Rosalind leaned on the paddle until her palms split, and the keeper, an old man called Sayer who had never once in forty years opened a gate for anyone under sixty, came down the steps with his lamp and told her she was mad. She said she knew. Then the water shifted under them like a held breath let go, the gates groaned open, and the Mercy Anne slid through with a sound like a bell struck softly.

Afterwards Tobias developed his film in the back room of the chandler's and found only one frame that came out sharp: Rosalind at the wheel, her face turned away, the ribbon lifting off the bow like a flag. Sayer kept that print in his tin for the rest of his days. He never did learn what the card was for, and that, my dears, is the one part of this I cannot tell you.