Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses with leaves on the outer upper thigh of a woman wearing a dark grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on the thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two open roses with outlined petals and leaves sits on the outer upper thigh. The linework is bold and dark, with stippled shading on the petals and leaves giving them depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with the subject's hands holding the hem of a dark grey top at the hips.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Rose Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Harrow Skerry, the rose bushes grew only in the lee of the chapel wall, because nothing else would hold against the wind. Old Maud Lennox kept the two bushes there and said they were a pair, one planted by her mother the year the boats did not come back, the other by her husband's brother the year he left. They bloomed together every June, two open heads leaning on each other like neighbours at a funeral.

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The islanders had a saying that a rose opened for whoever had planted it, and closed against anyone else who tried to pick it. Children tested this and were scratched for their trouble. One summer a stranger, a surveyor with a leather case and a pencil behind his ear, came to measure the coast for the lighthouse people and asked for a bloom to press in his book. Maud said no. He offered to pay. She said the roses did not want paying, and sent him down to the harbour with a bucket of mackerel instead.

He came back in October when the bushes were bare, and found her at the wall with a bud in her palm. It was small and tight as a fist, and it had not opened all year. "That one's yours," she said, "from the year you came asking." He looked at it a long while. Then he took out his pencil and drew it, the outline first, then the leaves, then dots of shadow along each petal until the paper went dark where the light could not reach.

The bud opened in March, in the dark of the chapel yard, and nobody saw it but the gull that sat on the wall. Maud pinned the drawing to the chapel door, where it stayed for forty winters, and people still say the rose on it is the only one on the island that never fades.