Three side-by-side views of a traditional style tattoo on a calf, showing a weightlifter in a red and white striped singlet with a barbell, laurel leaves and a banner reading Real Men Eat Plants.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Weightlifter and banner tattoo on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a muscular weightlifter in a red and white striped singlet, lifting a black barbell overhead, with green laurel leaves curving behind him. A red banner with cream lettering reading REAL MEN EAT PLANTS runs across the lower part of the design. The image is split into three panels of the same leg, with bold outlines, smooth shading on the figure and mostly red, green and black ink on hairy skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The posters at the Palace Pavilion promised Hercules Dunmore would raise four hundred pounds over his head, and by the second house the hall smelled of wet wool and peppermint. Dennis Marrow stood in the wings in his red and white striped singlet, rubbing chalk into his palms and reading the banner the promoter had hung behind him that afternoon. REAL MEN EAT PLANTS, it said, in cream letters on red, with a wreath of laurel leaves that looked to Dennis like something swiped from a cemetery gate.

Keep reading

"It's a gimmick, Dennis," the promoter had said, pushing a paper bag across the bar. Inside were watercress sandwiches and a jar of something green. Dennis had eaten liver on Tuesdays since he was nine and did not intend to start on a Saturday. Still, the banner had sold forty extra seats, and the lad from the local paper had written him up as the vegetable strongman. Dennis had wanted to ask whether a sausage roll counted.

Idris, the silent Welsh stagehand, lowered the bar on its chains. Dennis gripped it and felt the proper weight of it, which surprised him, because the plates were painted wood and he had only found out that morning. The real iron had gone missing somewhere between Leeds and the coast. He bent, drove the bar up in one clean pull, and held it while the hall went quiet, the laurel shaking on its nails behind him.

He set it down. The plates thudded, and from the front row a small boy shouted, "Eat your greens!" Dennis bowed low, and the house roared. Afterwards, in the dressing room, he unwrapped the watercress sandwich, bit into it, and found it was rather better than he would ever admit to the promoter.

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