Black and grey traditional-style roses with leaves and thorns tattooed on the back of a person's upper thigh, with white underwear visible.

Black and grey roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of three black and grey roses with shaded petals and dark leaves runs vertically over the side and back of the upper thigh. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with light grey highlights and heavier black in the leaves and petal folds. The person lies on a patterned bed sheet, and the tattoo is the main focus of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Rose Leaves Thorn Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had the grafting knife in her apron pocket when the van pulled up at the walled garden gate, and she did not take it out. The man who climbed down wore a grey jumper with the sleeves shoved up and said he had come about the roses. Nobody had grown roses on that wall since the war. She asked him what kind. He said the old black ones, the sort that look grey in the rain.

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Her grandmother had kept three bushes along the south wall, each cut back to a stake, and the family called them the Widow's Stack because they grew one above the other like a flight of steps. Dilys had been told never to prune the middle one. The thorns on the lower canes were thick as cat claws, and the leaves were dark enough to pass for soot on a fingertip. The man walked the length of the wall without touching anything, counting under his breath.

'They're not for sale,' she said. He nodded as if he had expected that, and took a folded page from his back pocket. It was a pencil drawing of the same three roses, shaded so the petals seemed lit from one side, each leaf edged in hard black. Underneath, in her grandmother's looping hand, were the words Dilys had written on the back of a seed packet years ago: keep the middle one. He had copied it perfectly.

Dilys took the knife from her pocket and handed him the secateurs instead. 'Cut the top one,' she said. 'Not the middle. Never the middle.' He did as he was told. The stake stood bare in the cold light, and for the first time in forty years the wall looked like it had been waiting for someone to ask.