Black and grey illustrated tattoos of a tall, pale groom and a bride in a long dress, one on each calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cartoon figures on matching calves

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two pale, elongated cartoon figures are tattooed side by side on a pair of lower legs: a tall man in a dark suit on the left and a woman in a long, flowing gown on the right. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the faces, suit and folds of the dress. The colour is restrained, with muted brown tones in the gown against an otherwise black and grey palette, and the two figures are spaced to mirror each other across the frame.

Calf Bride Suit

Find an artist for this

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 customs man at Callow Ford had stamped the same papers for thirty-one years, and he still squinted at the groom's passport as if the photograph had lied. Tobiah Reeve stood on the far bank in a suit gone green at the seams, his long arms hanging at his sides, one hand half-lifted towards the barrier. Across the brown water, his bride held her hem out of the mud with both fists and did not look back at the hut.

Keep reading

"Name of the bride?" asked Ines Haldane, who had inherited the stamp from her father and the river from nobody. "Lavinia Crane," said the woman on the bank, and the name carried over the current without effort, as if the water had been waiting to hear it. Ines knew the rule. The ford let a couple through only when neither could bear to be the one left behind, and it asked no other questions.

Lavinia drew a bundle of letters from the bodice of her gown, tied with black ribbon, and set the first one on the surface. The current should have carried it downstream. Instead it turned, slow as a page being turned, and drifted towards the groom until his fingers closed on it. He read it with his head bent, the way a man reads a menu in a language he almost knows, then folded it carefully into his breast pocket.

Ines picked up her pen and stamped the envelope of the letter, not the passport, with RETURNED in violet ink. Then she lifted the barrier, and the river, for once, ran quiet enough to hear two pairs of shoes on the gravel.