Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two men kissing in a traditional portrait

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two men with slicked back hair kissing in profile, their faces meeting at the centre of the composition. Both wear sailor style collars, and a red flower sits at the lower left. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading across the faces, hair and shoulders, while the flower and a small red accent provide the only colour against a black background.

Traditional Thigh Kiss Portrait Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Gillan had photographed sailors on the Hard at Portsmouth for eleven years, and she knew a man in uniform would sit still for anything except being looked at. So when two ratings climbed her studio steps on a wet Thursday in March, one with his hair oiled back into a pompadour like a wave going over, she pointed them at the painted lighthouse and told them to stand close and keep their chins up.

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They did not stand close enough to suit her, so she nudged the stool with her foot and said so. The taller one, Dennis, explained that his shipmate Walt had the ferry to Ryde at six, and that they had until then. Walt laughed and studied the floorboards. Ruth had seen enough men study floorboards to know what came next, so she kept her hand on the bellows and her mouth shut. When Dennis leaned in, Walt met him halfway, and their white collars with the navy stripes touched at the shoulder like two pages folding closed. She counted to three under her breath, the way her father had taught her, and pressed the bulb.

The plate came out grey and soft at the edges, and she could not decide whether the blur was her fault. She printed two copies anyway. Walt came back alone in June, his collar folded small in his coat pocket, and asked for the second print, paying in coins that had been warm in his fist. Ruth never asked after him. She tucked the picture into the back of her ledger, and somewhere between the wage sums and the weather she pressed in a red flower she had picked off the wet step that morning, and it left a stain the shape of a stubborn little bloom.