Colour traditional-style tattoo of a white unicorn head with a golden mane, surrounded by rainbow-coloured rays and a FOREVER banner, on a thigh.

Unicorn and FOREVER banner on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a white unicorn head with a gold mane and horn, set in front of a fan of rainbow-coloured rays in green, yellow, red, purple and blue. A brown ribbon banner reading FOREVER sits across the lower half, with two small stars and a small heart beneath it. Bold dark outlines and flat solid fills give it a classic, graphic look, photographed close up on a hairy thigh.

Traditional Thigh Unicorn Banner Rainbow Star Heart Lettering

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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 last matinee of the Pemberton and Gale Travelling Show has forty people in it, and you count them from the caravan step while Mr Gale argues with the council man about the pitch fee. The painted fan of rays is folded over the rail behind you, its green and purple already cracking where the damp got in. Your job every winter is to keep the unicorn looking like a unicorn and not a white pony dipped in custard. Bramble, the old mare, stands patient in the ring with a cardboard horn strapped to her forehead and a mane of gold tinsel that the children always try to pull.

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You have painted her seventeen times, and each time she looks a little less like the picture in your head. She has a long face and a sad eye, and the crowd doesn't seem to mind. When the band strikes up, she trots out under the rays, and for the length of one waltz the whole tent looks like the inside of a sweet tin. Afterwards the ticket girl sweeps up peel and the trapeze man smokes by the water tank, and nobody says the word closing out loud.

Mr Gale says it anyway, on the Friday, with the tent already half unpegged. He wants a last poster for the fence at the field gate, something that will outlast the ground they are leaving. You sit on an upturned crate with the tin of brown paint and a ribbon sketched in pencil, and you letter FOREVER in capitals because he asks for capitals. The letters look too big. You add a small heart beneath them, then two stars, because the lettering looks lonely by itself.

In April a boy with a bicycle stops at the fence and reads the poster aloud, slowly, the way you read things you do not believe. The rain has taken the ribbon's edge and the F has run into the wood. He asks you, from the other side of the wire, whether the horse is real or just painted. You tell him she is painted, and that the heart is still there, if he looks.