Black and grey botanical tattoo of leaves on a hip and roses, feathers and flowers on a thigh, with a banner reading LIGHT OF MY LIFE on the lower leg.

Botanical hip and rose thigh tattoos

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in pale lace underwear lies on white bedding, showing black and grey tattoos on her hip, thigh and lower leg. A cluster of dark leaves and stems sits on the hip, while the thigh carries roses, a feather and flowers in solid black ink with shading. A small banner on the lower leg reads LIGHT OF MY LIFE, and a further small design sits below it.

Botanical Traditional Thigh Other Leaves Stem Rose Feather Flower Banner Text Moth Bed

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

Nobody in Hollin Row believed the moth had come for the lamp. Mrs Vane said it had come for the roses, which had pushed up through the cracked glass of the old colliery glasshouse that spring as if they had something to prove, and Mr Pryce said a moth knows nothing of roses and only wants warmth. Nell said nothing. She had carried the lantern up the lane from the pit gate herself, and the moth had followed it the whole way, its wings the sooty grey of coal dust with a pale feather of light at the edge of each one.

Keep reading

Her father had worked the night shift for twenty-two years and died the winter before last, leaving her a biscuit tin of rose cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper. On the lid he had written in carpenter's pencil, light of my life, don't let the frost have them. She had kept the tin under the stairs because nobody in a coal town grows anything without a fight, and she had not been brave enough to plant them.

The night the moth arrived she opened the tin at last. The cuttings were dark at the nodes and green underneath, leaves worn smooth as something kept in a pocket, and one stem carried a bud already tight and red as a spark. She carried them to the glasshouse, knelt in the grit where the frost came through the panes, and pressed them into soil she had hauled up from the allotment one bucket at a time until her knees were black with it.

By June the roses had climbed the broken frame and filled the gap in the roof. The moth never left. Each evening it settled on the lantern hook above the door, wings open, and Nell sat on the step with her tea and watched it, asking it for nothing. Mrs Vane still says it was the roses that drew it in. Nell has never corrected her.