Black and grey realism roses with leaves and a dotted chain running down a woman's leg from thigh to ankle, with a small script tattoo on her wrist.

Black and grey roses down a leg

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on the floor in a patterned blue robe, photographed in a mirror with her phone raised, so her face is not shown. Shaded black and grey roses with leaves and sprigs run from the thigh down the shin towards the ankle, with fine dotted chain detail near the ankle. A small script tattoo sits on the wrist, and part of a line of lettering is visible on the thigh.

Realism Botanical Thigh Calf Ankle Hand Rose Leaves Flower Chain Dot Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses on the hill above Coldharbour were older than the lane, and everyone agreed they had been planted by a miller's wife who owed the sea a son. Nobody living could say how the story began, only that the bushes grew in a long line down the slope, black-green in the shade and grey where the frost had got into them, and that each spring they crept a little closer to the water.

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Hester Vane kept the path clear with a bill hook and a bad temper. She cut the briars back every Lent, and every Lent she found a thread of dew hanging from the lowest stem, beads strung one after another as neat as a rosary, though the air was dry and the frost had not lifted. She counted them once. There were nineteen. She stopped counting after that, because counting seemed to make them multiply.

One March a boy came up the lane from the harbour with a sack and no shoes. He said his father had gone out with the herring boats and not come back, and he wanted to know whether the roses would take him down to look. Hester told him the roses took nobody anywhere. He cut a single bloom anyway, and the thread of dew slid off the stem and wound round his wrist like a bracelet that would not wash off.

The boy's father walked up the lane in April, wet to the knee and grinning, having been cast onto a rock off Skerry and kept alive on limpets until the fishing smack found him. Hester never settled whether the roses had kept him. The bushes below the path grew another yard that spring, and the lowest bloom faced the sea, open and pale, with its chain of dew still hanging, waiting for the next pair of hands that wanted something back.