Two traditional style tattoos of trapeze acrobats in red, orange and yellow, one on each thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Trapeze acrobats on both thighs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two mirrored tattoos sit on the front of a pair of thighs, each showing a trapeze artist hanging upside down from a bar among pale pink and yellow clouds. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in red, orange, yellow and skin-toned shading are typical of traditional American tattooing. One figure wears a red outfit and the other a red and white striped costume, and the designs are arranged to face one another across the legs.

Traditional Thigh Cloud Bar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rigger had strung the bar too high again, so Ottilie hung from the rafters of the big top with her knees hooked over it and the whole crowd below looked like a field of upturned teacups. Vesna waited on the far platform in her striped jersey, the one her mother had dyed in the copper pot behind the wagons, and she counted under her breath in Hungarian because English numbers made her hands go cold.

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Pym's wife had painted the clouds on the canvas that summer, pink at the edges and yellow where the lamps caught them, and Ottilie swore they were the only honest thing in the tent. Rule number one was never to look at the crowd. Rule number two was to watch the hands, not the face, because a face would lie to you about where the wrist was going to be. She had broken rule two once in Skegness and had spent a week in a plaster corset.

On the third swing Vesna let go early. For one long breath there was nothing between them but air and the smell of sawdust and hot paraffin, and Ottilie dropped her arm the way you drop a rope to a man in a well. Their fingers met at the wrist and held. The band stopped. Somebody in the cheap seats began to cry, and Pym, who had been standing by the ropes with a cigarette he had forgotten to light, said nothing at all.

Afterwards, with the tent folded and the clouds rolled up like old maps, they sat on the tailboard of the wagon and Vesna asked why Ottilie had reached for her and not the net. Ottilie picked a thread of pink paint from under her thumbnail and said the net was only rope, and she had never once in her life trusted rope that wasn't looking back at her.