Black and grey traditional rose with leaves tattooed on the side of a hip and upper thigh, with the wearer lying on white bedding.

Black and grey rose on the hip and thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey rose with layered petals and several leaves and thorny stems trails down the side of the hip and onto the upper thigh. The bold outlines and soft grey shading give the rose depth, while the leaves are rendered with fine veins and darker shadows. The photo is taken at an angle on a white bed, with navy underwear at the bottom of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Rose Leaves Flower Thorn Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose came out on the supply boat in a tin bucket of wet sacking, two bare canes and a knot of root, and Dad said nothing that grows on a rock would take the salt. I planted it anyway in the lee of the boathouse, where the spray only reached in January, and I watered it from the rain butt with a dented enamel jug.

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By the third summer it had thorns as hooked as a fisherman's gaff and leaves that turned almost black when the wind came round to the north. Mum stopped calling it foolish. The morning the fog finally lifted off Carrick Skerry, I cut the first bloom, a cabbage-pale thing with its petals folded over like a hand of cards, and carried it up the hundred and seventeen steps to the lamp room where Dad sat with his bad knee and the logbook open on the iron rail.

He had not looked at the sea properly since the Erskine boat went down off the point. He took the rose without a word and turned it slowly under the brass, the shadows pooling in each curl of petal and sliding along the veins of the leaves. Then he drew the pen across the page and wrote the day's weather, wind south-west, visibility good, and under Remarks he wrote the name of the flower.

The relief ship would read that log in a fortnight. Dad looked at the line for a long time, then crossed the word out neatly, and wrote it again underneath.