Neo-traditional tattoo of a zebra head with teal beads and pink flowers on the upper leg, shaded in black and grey with colour accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Zebra head with pink flowers on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A zebra head in profile is shaded in black and grey, with its mane and stripes picked out in bold black linework. Teal beads and pink jewelled details hang across its face, and two pink flowers with green leaves sit beneath the muzzle. The design fills a vertical area of skin, with the flowers balancing the head at the lower left.

Neo-trad Thigh Flower Bead Jewel Animal Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The zebra's head hangs above the sideboard in the front parlour of Gull Crest, between the barometer and a sampler that reads Home Is Where The Tide Is, and on your first morning Mrs Hobday tells you not to touch the beads. You don't ask why. On the Yorkshire coast you learn quickly that questions cost more than the room. Her husband Alfred won the head at a travelling fair in 1931, she says, along with the teal glass beads and the two pink stones he swore were rubies. Every September, when the lodgers are out on the sands, she restrings the lot with fishing line and a darning needle, and every September the old thread is thinner.

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This year the line gives way in a wet October week. The beads go skittering across the lino and under the sideboard, and you are on your knees with a torch, counting them against the skirting, when your fingers find a flat wooden panel that rattles. Behind it, pressed between two sheets of brown paper, are a dozen pink flowers, their petals gone the colour of weak tea. Someone has pinned a card to them in careful capitals: FOR THE GIRL WHO CAME IN OUT OF THE WEATHER. There is no name.

You restring the beads before supper, using the good linen thread Mrs Hobday keeps in her sewing tin, and you tie each knot tight. When you hang the head back on its nail, the pink stones catch the lamp, and the zebra looks almost pleased with itself. You leave the flowers where they are. Some things in a house like this were put away so they would be found by the right person, and you are not sure yet whether that is you.