Watercolour-style ballerina tattoo with black linework and blue, red and green washes on the calf.

Watercolour ballerina on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A ballerina in an arched pose, one arm raised overhead and the other extended, is drawn in loose black linework. Soft washes of blue, red, green and purple fill the tutu and body and bleed beyond the outlines. The figure sits centrally on the calf against a blurred checkerboard floor.

Calf Dancer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands off that lamp, it's hotter than it looks, and listen, because the bit everybody gets wrong is the arm. Iris Penrose had one arm flung up as if she were hailing a boat on the far bank, and the other reaching out over the water as though she meant to hold the whole river still. That's the pose. Nobody on the Tallow had ever seen anything like it, and we'd seen plenty, because the travelling show had tied up behind us at Stoke Lock with its painted wagons and its one lame bear.

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The lock-house hall had a floor of black and cream tiles, chequered like a draughts board, and that's where she danced the night the Cut came up over the towpath. Old Maud Harrow, the keeper's daughter, had gone to bed with a candle and a sulk, because the sluice wouldn't shut and the whole hall smelled of wet rope. Then the music started up from somebody's fiddle, and Iris went round that floor on the points of her toes like a pin on a spindle. Her skirt was the blue of the bargee's spare paint tin, and wherever it swung it dragged a little green from the lock-house walls and a little red from the lamp, so the colour ran off the cloth and onto the tiles.

Maud came down in her nightgown to tell them to stop, and stayed on the bottom step with her mouth open.

In the morning the water had dropped, and the tiles still held a smear of blue and rust where the hem had brushed them, bleeding out past the lines of the squares. The keeper tried to scrub it away with sand and vinegar. He never shifted it. People came from three locks down to look at it, and they all agreed the river had painted her there, and that she'd have been glad of the company.