Black tribal tattoos with spiral and leaf motifs on a person's upper thigh and lower leg, shown in a photo with a patterned sarong.

Tribal thigh tattoos in black ink

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two large black tribal-style tattoos sit on the upper thigh and the outer thigh of a person's legs. The bold spiral and curling leaf forms are built from solid black lines, with fine hatching and dotted detail in the leaf sections. The image is shot in warm natural light against a green and white patterned fabric, with a pink and blue sarong in the foreground.

Thigh Tribal pattern Spiral Leaf Wave Flower

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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 tracing paper arrived in a biscuit tin in March, folded twice inside an airmail envelope with an Apia postmark the sorting machine had nearly swallowed. Mere had written on the back in blue biro: "Don't let the Manchester man change the curl. The fern opens the way it opens." Ruth read it standing at the kitchen sink while the kettle went cold behind her.

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The pattern had been her grandmother's, drawn on the back of a church newsletter, the spirals tight as a fist at one end and loosening into waves at the other. Ruth had spent three winters trying to draw it from memory and failing, because her memory kept putting the leaf on the wrong side. Now it sat in pencil in front of her, every hatch line counted out by a woman who had never once been paid for drawing.

The artist, a quiet man called Tui who worked from a room above a launderette in Salford, laid the tracing over a stencil sheet and held it to the window. "Your gran's hidden a wave in here," he said. He cut the spiral wider than the paper had it and kept the leaf exactly as it was, dotting the fern tips the way Mere's notes asked. Ruth watched the outline lift off the paper like something breathing out.

A week after she posted him the first photograph, Mere replied with a single line: "Good. Now the wave goes the other way." Ruth laughed at the table, then fetched a pen and began to draw it.