Traditional-style tattoo of upside-down legs in striped stockings and black shoes, with a swallow and teardrop shapes, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Upside-down legs in striped stockings on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pair of upside-down legs in striped stockings and black shoes fills the centre of the forearm, outlined in bold black linework. Orange, red, green and blue accents appear in the teardrop shapes, the shoe details and the swallow at the left edge. The solid colour fills and heavy outlines give the piece a flat, classic look, and other tattoos are partly visible around the edges of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Leg Shoe Swallow Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Crane House stuck between the seventh and eighth floors so often that the caretaker, Mr Dunmore, stopped ringing the repairman and left a flask on the landing instead. Old Vera Pring lived on the ninth, and she swore that when the lift stuck, a pair of legs came down the shaft from the sky, upside down, in striped stockings and black shoes, and walked the cable like a tightrope.

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Nobody believed her until the winter the power failed for three nights. The children of the block climbed to the roof with torches to look at the stars and found the legs there instead, kicking gently above the parapet, belonging to nobody. A swallow sat on the water tank watching them with its head on one side. Vera said the legs belonged to Ada Lusk, who had gone up the stairs one wet morning to pin out washing and had never come down, and that the swallow was the only one who had kept her company since.

The children asked what the legs wanted. Vera said they wanted to be stood on the ground again, but a girl who has walked upside down for forty years forgets how to be the right way up. So every drop of rain that ran off the roof edge was a tear Ada had shed for the stairs she had missed, and the flask on the landing was for the swallow, who was owed a drink for every message it carried between the floors.

On the fourth night the lift came free. Mr Dunmore, climbing up to change the bulb, found the roof empty except for the swallow and a pair of black shoes set side by side on the tank, laces tied, as if someone had stepped out of them and gone down the stairs in her stockings.