Traditional style flower tattoo with a blue-grey wash, white petal outlines and black leaves on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue-grey flower and leaves on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large flower sits at the centre of the design, with a dark centre, white outlined petals and a ring of scalloped detail, set on a blue-grey wash shape. Black leaves and sprigs curve around the flower and extend down the thigh. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading in the leaves, and the design is shown in a warm-toned photo with the person's head and face out of frame.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Flower Leaves Sprig Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the woad vat stirred before the bell for lauds, as he had every morning for thirty-one years, and the liquor had gone from green to a deep wet blue. He skimmed the bloom off with a flat paddle of pear wood and listened to the cloister settling into quiet. Under the psalter in his cell lay a letter from the bishop's clerk, folded twice, asking why the reliquary cover was late.

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The reliquary was a silver rose boss with its rim cut in scallops like the edge of a communion wafer, and it was to be washed in the blue ground so the saints beneath would show through like stars through thin cloud. Prior Hugh wanted it by Candlemas. Anselm wanted only to get the petals right, because the petals were the flower his sister had grown behind their mother's cottage, and he had sworn at his profession that he would never paint anything that reminded him of her. He had broken that vow a little each year since.

He laid the leaves first in black, sharp as crow feathers, then the dark heart of the bloom, and last the white-edged petals, leaving a small gap in each where the brush would not go. Brother Edmund, who was young and talkative, asked what the gaps were for. Anselm said they were for breath, so the flower could open in its own time, and went back to his wash before the boy could ask him what he meant.

When the reliquary was carried into the bishop's chapel at Candlemas, the blue had soaked so deep into the creases of Anselm's fingers that the infirmarian scolded him for it. He did not scrub it away. Each morning after that he stirred the vat, skimmed the bloom, and held his hands up to the grey window, where the colour lay faint as a vein beneath the skin.