Black and grey dotwork and realism tattoo of a closed book with triangle motifs, surrounded by poppies and sprigs, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Book with triangles and poppies on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A closed book with a triangle design on its cover sits at the centre of the composition, with two poppy flowers and thin sprigs with leaves spreading out around it. The linework is fine and dark, and the book and petals are shaded with stippled dots and soft grey gradients. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the upper outer thigh, with the skin and dark fabric at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Book Triangle Poppy Flower Sprig Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Hush now, and pass the bread, because the wind has got the shutters and I'll not be heard over it. The book on the high shelf came off a carrier's cart the winter the Pass shut. Its cover bore three triangles, point up, stacked one above the other like the peaks you see from the Harrow road when the cloud lifts, and nobody in Ashby Dale could read a word inside it.

Keep reading

Old Margery Coe bought it for two shillings and a goose. She pressed poppies between the pages every June, red ones from the stony field behind the mill, and she said each flower was a night she had slept through. By the third winter the book had grown heavy with them, and the petals had gone to paper-thin lace that smelled faintly of smoke.

Then the snow came down on the Pass for nine days, and the cart road filled to the hedges. A young drover, Tobias Penn, sheltered in the back room here, and on the sixth night he woke with a sprig of grey-leaved lavender tucked in his collar and no memory of putting it there. He swore the book had been turning its own pages. Margery only laughed and said the triangles were doors, and a door opens from one side only if you knock from the other.

Come morning the drifts had gone, and the book was back on its shelf, closed and tied with dried grass. Penn left before breakfast, and I have kept the knot as he tied it, because a thing like that should be undone by whoever is brave enough. Bolt your own door tonight, mind, and let the wind do the knocking.