Black and grey botanical tattoo of layered roses, dahlia-like blooms, leaves and blackberries running down the outer thigh.

Botanical flowers and blackberries on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical cluster of flowers, including a large dahlia-like bloom, several roses and smaller five-petalled blossoms, is drawn with fine black outlines and grey shading. Blackberries and leaves are scattered along the stems, which weave between the blooms from top to bottom. The design is shown on the outer thigh with plain skin around it, and the ink appears well defined with some soft grey shading in the petals.

Botanical Thigh Flower Rose Dahlia Blackberry Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn early that the dahlias in Mrs Pargeter's walled garden at Hollin End must be staked before the wind gets up, and that the blackberries along the lane belong to nobody until August. You are nine, your fingers already purple to the second knuckle, and she tells you the brambles can take a hand if you pick from the top and never reach under.

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Every Sunday the two of you walk the rows with a bucket and a pair of secateurs older than her late husband's pipe. She names the roses as if they were guests: Albertine, Madame Hardy, and one with no name at all that she calls Old Sal. Among the dahlias there is a bloom the size of a dinner plate that she swears has never once opened the same way twice. Bramble stems run under the fence and climb through the roses, and she lets them, because, she says, a garden is only ever a negotiation.

The summer you turn twelve she gives you a root cutting wrapped in damp newspaper, with a brown paper label in her looping hand. Take it to your own yard, she says, and don't let the council cut it back. Your mother thinks it's a weed. You plant it against the north wall where nothing else will grow, and for two years it sulks, sending up leaves that look like they've been dipped in ink.

The third spring, a single white flower opens in the shade, five petals pale as milk, and a blackberry ripens beside it. You eat the berry standing at the sink without thinking to wash it. The label has faded to the colour of weak tea, but her handwriting still holds: Keep it where the light is kind.