Black and grey traditional-style rose tattoo with leaves on the outer thigh, seen through a tear in ripped denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose tattoo on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's upper leg showing a black and grey rose with shaded petals, dark leaves and a small bud, set against ripped denim. A second, darker leafy tattoo is partly visible higher up on the leg. The shading is soft and the linework is bold, with the rose sitting centrally in the frame.

Traditional Thigh Rose Leaves Flower Bud

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

Sit yourself on that upturned bucket and mind the dog, he thinks every story is a biscuit. Now then. The rose on Mr Pallister's wall was never a rose at first. It was a bramble cutting, grey as a drowned man's knuckles, that his wife pushed into the mortar the week the telegram came. She said it would take or it wouldn't, and either way she'd be out there every morning with the kettle.

Keep reading

For forty winters it sulked. The leaves came up dark at the edges, as if somebody had dipped them in the coal scuttle, and every spring the old man swore he'd dig it out. He never did. He sat on that bench with his pipe cold in his teeth and watched the bud swell and shrink, swell and shrink, like a fist that couldn't decide whether to open. Nobody expected a bloom. Nobody asked it for one.

Then came the June the postman's bicycle went over in the lane and the whole village ran out in their slippers to help. When they came back up the path, the rose had opened in the night. One dark bloom the size of a teacup, its petals shaded from ash to soot, and Mr Pallister sitting beneath it with a letter open on his knee. Their son, given up for dead at Dunkirk, was alive in a camp in Poland and walking home by the Thursday train.

The postman never got his sandwiches back, the kettle went cold on the step, and nobody thought to move the bucket. The bloom dropped its petals by the Sunday, but the stem is still on that wall, and the bud sits there every winter, shut tight, waiting for someone to come up the path with news.