Black and grey botanical tattoo with script lines on a thigh, with a hand making a peace sign at the top left.

Botanical and script tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a bent leg showing a black and grey tattoo across the thigh and down towards the knee. The design includes shaded leafy or floral elements and a band of fine script or lines across the upper thigh. A hand forming a peace sign, a grey top and pink socks appear at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Lettering Thigh Leaves Flower Script Text

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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

You learned the names of plants before you learned your letters, because your grandmother kept the allotment behind the chapel rows and the pit wheel turned over the top of it all day. Ivy on the wall, foxgloves the men said would kill a horse, a wild rose that climbed the lamp post outside the Co-op. She wrote the Latin on the backs of seed packets and made you copy each one out in pencil until the lead wore grey.

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The summer the colliery closed, the shift whistle stopped and nobody knew what to do with their hands. You took a tin of tea up to the allotment and found her on an upturned bucket, reading the psalm aloud to the bean poles. She could no longer see the small print, and her eyes had gone to milk. She asked you to write the words in the margin of the family Bible, every line, so the verses would stay where she could find them with her fingers.

You copied it at her kitchen table with the window open and coal dust on the washing outside. Leaves first, then the thin band of verse, line after line, until your hand ached and the ink bled in the damp. When you finished she ran a thumb over the lettering and said you had spelled tenderness wrong. You laughed so hard you had to hold the table.

She died in October, the week the bean poles came down in the first frost. You kept the Bible. The word she corrected is still there, spelled your way, and you have never once thought of changing it.