A watercolour-style tattoo of a ballerina in a black silhouette with a multicoloured tutu, on the outer thigh.

Watercolour ballerina on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a ballerina with arms raised and one leg lifted, drawn as a black silhouette with a fine outline on the head and arms. The tutu and dancer's body are filled with loose, bleeding washes of yellow, green, pink, blue and purple, with dripping edges that resemble watercolour paint. The design sits on the outer thigh and is photographed close up against pale skin.

Thigh Dancer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gwen had stitched the tutu from the last of her late husband's dye lots, the ones he kept for the nets, so when the rain came down over the quay the skirt began to bleed. Yellow ran first, then the green of the buoy paint, then a violet nobody in the village could name. She stood at the harbour wall with a lamp in one hand and watched the colours slide down the cotton and drip off the hem onto the wet stones, as if the dancer were shedding her costume one wash at a time.

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The Marisol had not come in. Three boats were still past the breakwater, and the fleet's wives had been counting lights since dusk. Pell's boy, Tomas, kept asking whether the dancing would start again, because his father had promised to watch from the deck the night before he sailed, and that was the last thing he had said to the boy. Gwen told him the music would go on until the boats were in, which was true enough for a village that paid its debts in mackerel.

Just before midnight a light showed beyond the wall, swinging low, then steady. Gwen lifted her arms the way the dancer in the painted skirt lifted hers, the way she had once in the church hall at seventeen, and Tomas laughed and copied her badly with his sleeves flapping. The Marisol came round the breakwater with her nets streaming and her colours still bright on the bow, and the whole quay seemed to hold its breath until the hull knocked against the steps.

By morning the hem had washed clean off the stones, and the sea had taken a fair share of the yellow and the violet. Gwen found a single green thread caught on the iron ring at the foot of the steps and tied it round her wrist, where it stayed the whole winter.