Close view of a person in ripped denim shorts showing a colourful traditional-style tattoo of a fanged creature on the stomach, with a snake and rose on the upper arm and roses and lettering on the

Traditional tattoos on torso, arm and thigh

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows a close crop of a torso, hips and upper legs in ripped denim shorts. A large traditional-style tattoo of a fanged creature with pink and green details covers the stomach, with a snake and rose on the upper arm at the left edge and roses and a lettered design on the thigh. The bold black outlines and flat red, green, pink and orange fills are set against the dark top and light background.

Traditional Upper arm Thigh Other Snake Rose Creature Lettering

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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

The barge was called the Marigold and she had not been painted since the summer your father died, so when the rats came aboard through the coal hatch you were not surprised. They ran along the gunwale at dusk like men late for a shift, and the cat you had bought in Stourport took one look and went back to sleep under the stove.

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You spent the first week on traps and the second on pride. Neither worked. On the third evening you sat on the cabin step with a tin of black tar and a brush no wider than a finger, and you began painting the old fanged fish on the bow again, the one your father had copied from a sailor in Gloucester. His grandmother had told him a creature on the hull keeps the river from taking what it likes. You painted it bigger than it had been, with teeth like a pike and a tongue like a red ribbon. Below it, on the strake where the paint was still wet, you lettered NO RATS in tall black capitals, the way the lock-keepers did on their gates.

The next morning the coal hatch was clean. A grey hair had caught in the wet black of the T, curled like a question mark, and you picked it free with a fingernail and kept it in an empty tobacco tin on the shelf above the kettle.

Nothing bothered the barge after that, though the river took plenty else. By autumn the lettering had faded to a grey ghost, and you still did not repaint it. You liked how it looked like a promise someone had only half kept.