Black linework Vitruvian man figure inside a circle and square on a calf, overlaid with magenta, orange, blue and red watercolour washes and handwritten script.

Vitruvian man watercolour calf tattoo

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A linework drawing of the Vitruvian man, with arms and legs spread within a circle and square, is tattooed on the calf. Fine black outlines and a small grey-shaded head sit over loose watercolour washes in magenta, orange, blue and red that bleed down the leg. Two lines of handwritten script run above and below the figure, framing the composition.

Forearm Circle Square Handwriting Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad drew the man on the back of my dance card the summer I turned fourteen, and he made me learn the steps inside his shapes before I was allowed a partner. Arms out to the square, feet to the circle, he said, and you will never tread on anyone. The Lyceum Rooms in Hebden Bridge had a sprung floor that gave under you like a held breath, and on Saturdays I chalked the two shapes across it before the doors opened while the caretaker grumbled about the dust.

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Mr Pryor, who taught the quickstep on the other side of the hall, said the drawing was a pantomime for children. The band boys laughed. Then came the autumn dance, the one with the lamps turned low and the gauze dresses, and Mrs Haigh knocked a glass of cherry cordial down the front of her frock. The red ran into the blue of the lady beside her, and both of them spread across the boards in a wash like the stains on my father's paper when he rinsed his brushes. Nobody could tell whose colour was whose, and the dancers stepped through it without stopping.

Pryor found me at the end of the night, his bow tie undone. He stood at the edge of the chalk and studied the figure for a long time. Show me the turn, he said. I did it with my arms out and my feet in the circle, and when I came round the sweep of the square I was standing exactly where the old lines had been. He didn't laugh. In the morning the caretaker mopped the whole floor and the shapes went with the water, all except one thin pink streak that ran from the circle to the door, which nobody could get out.