Illustrated tattoo on the upper thigh of a woman in a patterned headscarf, resting her chin on her hand beside a rocking horse and a pram wheel, with a green wash and red accent.

Woman with rocking horse on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in a patterned headscarf resting her chin on one hand, with a rocking horse and a pram with wheels beside her. The linework is clean and black, with grey shading on the scarf and features, and a loose green wash behind the figure. A small red accent on the cheek adds a single warm note against the cool palette.

Thigh Woman Headscarf Hand Wheel Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens had been going since three, and the flour hung in the light over the proving racks like something that hadn't decided whether to settle. Vera came in at ten to five, same as every Tuesday, pushing nothing and towing nothing, except that she was always towing something. Behind her, on a length of string, a wooden rocking horse bumped over the step, its runners clicking on the tiles as if it had opinions about the threshold.

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She ordered one currant bun and a tea she never drank, then sat at the window with her chin in her palm and watched the street go from ink to pewter to the colour of the sea off Margate. I asked her once whether the horse had been a present. She looked at me for a long while over the rim of the cup before answering. "It was waiting for someone to get big enough," she said, "and then nobody did, so I took it for walks instead."

Some mornings she told me things and some mornings she only tapped the glass with one finger, keeping time with nothing. I stopped asking. I learned to leave the bun warm and let the horse rock in the draught by the door.

Then one Tuesday the string was tied to the railing outside with a neat double knot, the horse leaned out over the gutter, and the window table was bare, its cup washed and turned upside down on the saucer. Under the cup was a folded green ribbon and a note in careful capitals: TAKE HER FOR A RIDE WHEN IT GETS LIGHT. I untied the horse, walked it round the block twice in the grey, and felt faintly ridiculous and entirely unafraid of being seen.