Traditional style tattoos covering both lower legs, including roses, a heart and a bird, shown with white canvas shoes and a daisy-print skirt.

Traditional tattoos on both legs

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two legs rest on a wooden floor, covered from the ankles up to the knees with traditional style tattoos. Designs include a sunburst-like emblem, roses, a heart, a dagger-like shape, a bird, a helmeted head and a pin-up style figure, with some lettering in an unreadable script. Bold black outlines sit alongside red, green and yellow fills, with grey shading in places.

Traditional Calf Rose Heart Dagger Bird Pin-up Script Sunburst Helmet

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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

Sit yourselves down and let the fiddler catch his breath, because I'm going to tell you about the night Arthur Pike sat in Mo Halloran's booth above the chip shop and refused to get up until she'd finished his leg. Nobody in Margate has ever agreed on what he was trying to prove.

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Arthur had been on the door of the Lantern Ballroom for eleven years and collected his marks the way other men collect stamps. A sunburst from a ferry crossing, a swallow off the pier wall, a helmet from a bad week in Germany. Mo had a pin-up tacked to her wall, a girl with victory rolls painted in red and yellow, and Arthur wanted her on his calf. Mo said she'd do it if he sat still through the whole of the slow waltz, and he did, though his face went the colour of the rose she'd already drawn.

The trouble came when the dagger went on. Mo had drawn it with a heavy black edge and one bead of red at the hilt, and Arthur kept asking her to go deeper, the way a man does when he's trying to outrun something. Halfway through he said his wife had gone off with a lifeguard. Mo never looked up. She said the needle didn't care who'd left whom.

Years later Arthur still danced with a limp and a pin-up on his leg, and every Saturday he'd nod at the girl on the wall who'd never once been asked to leave. Then he'd turn to the floor, where the couples were spinning under the glitter ball, and say the bird was the only honest thing on him. A swallow always comes back, he'd say. That's all any of us are asking.