Two thigh tattoos side by side: a shaded wolf with a woman's face in a red geometric frame on the left, and a leopard with feathers in black linework on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf and leopard thigh tattoos

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit on the inner and outer thighs of a pair of legs, with black studded garments visible above them. The left thigh shows a shaded wolf's head with a woman's face drawn above it, set inside a red and orange triangular border, with some blue-grey tones in the eyes. The right thigh shows a leopard's head in black and grey linework and stippled spots, surrounded by an oval frame and feather motifs.

Neo-trad Thigh Wolf Leopard Woman Feather Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the crates and mind the tent pegs. This is the tale of the Ardath sisters, who ran the painted booth at Lowther Green, and of the two canvases they hung either side of the big top gate. Maud could paint a wolf so true you'd check your boots for mud. Ivy could paint a face. Between them they made one picture a year, and every year they fell out over it.

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The summer I'm telling of, the sisters were not speaking. Maud had painted the wolf with a woman's face floating above him, set inside that red and orange frame she'd copied off a Turkish rug, and Ivy said the face was hers and she wanted it back. Maud said the face belonged to nobody, which was the whole point of it. So one night, when the generator was sulking, Ivy took a brush of her own and painted a leopard onto the second board, ringed round with feathers she'd pulled from the carousel horse's tail.

Next morning the crowd came for the pictures and found them hung side by side, the wolf and the leopard facing each other across the gate. Nobody could say which sister had won. Maud laughed until she had to sit down on the ticket box, and Ivy pretended not to hear. The fair moved on to Ashcombe that week, and the boards travelled in the same van, wrapped in one blanket.

Where they went after that I cannot tell you. But if you stand at the back of the green when the lamps come on and look up at the gate, you'll see the leopard's eyes have caught the light, and the wolf is looking straight at you, with a woman's patient face above him, as if she were the one minding the gate.