Traditional style tattoo of a black umbrella with falling raindrops and a red flower on a lower leg, just above the ankle.

Umbrella and flower on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black umbrella with orange and yellow trim sits above a small red five-petalled flower, with dark raindrops falling from above and beside it. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing. Both black and grey tones and red, orange and yellow ink are used, and the design is shown against a plain background with a pair of grey canvas shoes at the bottom of the frame.

Traditional Calf Umbrella Raindrop 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 rain has been coming in off the Channel since Tuesday, and the boarding house on Marrow Terrace has run out of places to hang wet coats. You took the job in October, when Mrs Ashdown was still alive and the kettle still worked. Now the umbrella stand by the door holds nine black umbrellas, none of them yours, and the guests treat them as communal property.

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The ones with flower prints belong to the couple in room four, who leave at eleven each morning and return soaked to the bone. A man in a pale mac asks for his usual table by the bay window every evening, though he has not paid since August. You know his umbrella by its orange trim and the way one spoke has bent like a broken wing. He always leaves it open in the hall to drip onto the tiles, and you always mop them without complaint.

On Thursday the old umbrella is gone. In its place is a note written in pencil on the back of a tide timetable: Keep the red flower for me, I'll come back for it at dusk. You search the cupboard under the stairs, the bins, the bay window where the wind rattles the glass. At last you find it folded inside the piano stool, the trim faded to the colour of weak tea, a single dried petal caught in the seam.

At dusk you carry it down to the pier, pressing it open against the gusts, and the drops strike the black canopy like full stops. Further along the promenade a figure in a pale mac stands at the rail, one hand lifted. You walk out to meet him, and for once the rain falls only on the sea.