Overhead view of two people in bed with traditional style tattoos of a snake, roses and a panther head on their legs, forearm and hand, with breakfast plates beside them.

Traditional tattoos on legs and forearms in bed

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two people sit in bed seen from above, with bold traditional tattoos covering a bare leg, a forearm and hands. Motifs include a red rose, a coiled snake, a swallow, a crescent moon with an arrow, a panther head and a snake head on the hand, all outlined in black. Colour ink in red, blue, green and pink dominates over black outlines, and two plates of pancakes with banana sit on the bedding.

Traditional Calf Thigh Forearm Hand Rose Snake Swallow Panther Crescent moon Arrow Flower Heart Coral Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread had gone hard by the time the bell rang for the third time, and you were still at the edge of Ashcombe Wood with a basket on your arm and a cord of red wool knotted round your wrist for luck. Nobody in the village went past the last stile after dusk. The old keeper, Mabel Ferrow, said the panther had come down from the hills the winter the mill burned, and that it kept to the bramble where the moon fell through the oaks like a bent blade.

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You went anyway, because your brother had left his lamp on the wrong side of the stile, and because a swallow had been circling the lych gate all afternoon, which meant rain, which meant the lamp would be spoilt. The path bent and bent. Roots crossed it like snakes sunning themselves. A wild rose had seeded itself in the ditch, red as a cut, and a fox watched you from under it with no interest at all. You found the lamp hanging from a hawthorn, still lit, and beside it the panther, sitting upright, its eyes the colour of brass.

It did not move, and neither did you. Then you set the basket down slowly and said what your grandmother said to strangers at the market: that the moon was high, the arrow was loosed, and you had only come for what was yours. The great head turned once. It rose, stepped aside into the ferns, and you understood you had been let through the way you might let a neighbour's dog through your gate.

At the stile your brother was waiting with a clean shirt over his arm. "You went in," he said. "I did." "And?" You looked back. The crescent moon hung over the oaks with its arrow through the lower curve, and far off in the bracken something lay down with a long sigh. You held out the lamp and said nothing, which was the first thing the wood had taught you.