Colour tattoo of a blue rose with green leaves and a thorned stem on the ankle, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue rose with leaves and stem on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A blue rose in full bloom sits at the top of a long green stem with thorns, with three green leaves shaded in yellow-green. The petals are shaded from deep blue to pale highlights, with defined outlines and soft gradients. The design is centred on the outer ankle and leg, with plain skin and a dark background around it.

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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 closer, the wind up here takes the good bits off a story before they reach you. You want to know why the carter's sons won't cut the thorn bushes on Cold Stile? Then you'll hear about Marta Dunmore, who walked that pass every winter with a lantern and a sack of salt for the sheep-folk on the far side.

Keep reading

The pass had thorn bushes higher than any other ground in the valley, black and twisted, and in her third winter of walking she found one of them flowering. Not red, not white. Blue as the shadow lying across fresh snow at dusk. Its stem was long and green and bristling, and its leaves were the yellow-green of lichen on wet stone. Each thorn drew a bead of blood when she pulled a bloom free, and each bead dropped into the snow like a small red coin.

She carried that one bloom down the mountain in a tin cup of melted snow. At the village they laughed and said nobody grows blue roses, that she'd dyed it with woad. Her brother took the cup from her and tipped the water out to prove it, and there was nothing in the bottom but a single petal, pale at the edges and deep blue at the heart. It kept that colour for forty years in a drawer, and nobody ever argued with it again.

So when you cross Cold Stile, look down at the thorn bushes. Count the thorns. If you find one that has marked the snow with blood, leave the bloom where it grows, and the pass will let you through.

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