Two traditional-style thigh tattoos: a purple rose with an animal skull on the left thigh, and a black and grey cat head with a red rose on the right thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skull and cat with roses on thighs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit on the upper thighs of a person wearing denim shorts. The left shows a grey animal skull with a purple-pink rose and green leaves, and the right shows a black and grey cat head with a red rose and leaves. Both use bold outlines and solid fills against plain, lightly lit skin.

Traditional Thigh Skull Animal skull Rose Cat Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Anselm had kept the cat for six winters before he noticed she was the only creature at Saint Wendreda's who never asked him for anything. She came to the scriptorium at vespers, settled on the lid of the vellum box, and watched the ink dry with the gravity of a bishop. The abbot called her a nuisance. The novices called her Vespers. Anselm called her nothing at all, because a name made a thing harder to lose.

Keep reading

The winter the east range roof began to leak, damp crept into the library and mice crept into everything else. Anselm found the skull in the rafters while hunting for a dry psalter: a small grey skull, clean as a shell, no bigger than a thimble. He carried it down in his palm to the infirmarian's cell, where Sister Hild kept roses in a clay pot by the window. She told him it was a field vole, that the cat had only done what cats do, and that the roses would not mind the company. She tucked a bud into the empty socket, and for a moment the little skull looked as though it had decided to bloom.

Vespers grew thin that spring and stopped climbing onto the vellum box. Hild said she was old and had earned her rest. Anselm buried her under the medlar tree and set the vole skull on the stone above her, the grass already thick around its edges.

Each morning after, he found one red rose lying on that stone, cut from Hild's pot, its petals still beaded with dew. Nobody had asked him to keep a cat's grave, and nobody had said who was keeping his.