questions like this show the limited helpfulness of asking a self-selecting group of online people to do your editing ... It is impossible to say definitively which is best or better without having some shared standard and since none of us know what your intended use or standards are, we are all left to just make pronouncements based on our own personal (and idiosyncratic) standards and, unless each of the responders tells you explicitly what their standard is, you don't really have any way to evaluate the standards we are using to make our choices either!
In this case, I agree with Scamper that #3 has no real "punctum" for me. #2 is pleasant but still rather bland. I personally like #1 the best and would never crop out the righthand figures, because (for me) they are the center of interest here; we cannot see the work being done on the leg (I am guessing it's henna), but what we can see (obliquely) is the curiosity and idle gestures of the two onlookers: the lady watching the proceedings and idly chewing on her glasses and the little boy, who is obviously also watching, idly itching his nose.
Even though it breaks some of the canonical "rules of composition", I personally feel it has more drama and human interest than the other two. But, again, I have to emphasize that this is just my own personal reaction, based on my own standards of what makes a good photograph.
As an unrelated question, I am seeing a lot of images on flickr lately that have those bars (white or black) on just two sides of the frame and I cannot for the life of me understand why people leave them on instead of cropping them out. Is there an aesthetic reason for this? I find it mystifying...
