Black and grey illustrated tattoo of two figures, one kneeling and holding the head of the other, on the outer thigh.

Two figures on a thigh tattoo

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a kneeling figure with short dark hair holding the head of a second figure whose long, dark body curves up beside it. The style is graphic and illustrative, built from solid black fills with thin white highlight lines and simple facial detail. The design is in black and grey on pale skin, photographed close up against a bed and a floral fabric.

Thigh Figure Head Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eel-woman came up through the sluice gate the week the mill froze, and my mother said nobody was to touch her until the magistrate arrived from Harrowgate. I was nine and I did not listen. Her head had struck the iron grate on its way through, and when she lifted it out of the black water it rolled against my knees like a river stone, eyes open, mouth working at nothing.

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I knelt on the cold flags and took her head in both hands, the way Nan had taught me to hold a hatchling that had fallen from the eaves. Her long body went on and on behind her, down the steps and into the race, dark and glossy, and I felt it shiver through the stones like a bell struck and not yet still. "Hold still," I told her. She said, in a voice like water running out of a jug, that I was holding too tight, and I loosened my fingers by a hair and no more.

The magistrate's men came with lanterns and a handcart and a length of chain. They wanted her for the tithe house, to be shown at the autumn fair beside the two-headed lamb. I would not move. My mother wept and my father pulled at my collar, and still I kept my hands where they were, cradling the wet crown of her skull while the lantern light swung over us both. By dusk the men had grown tired of shouting, and the cart went back up the hill empty.

When the lamplighter had gone, I lowered her head into the race. Her body unwound from the steps like thread off a spindle, slow and then quick, and the last I saw of her was one pale hand lifted from the water, still curved as though it held something the size of a child's head.