Black fine line tattoo of a castle with spires, roses and four-pointed stars on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle, roses and stars on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of a castle with tall spires sits above a cluster of three roses, with four-pointed stars scattered around the top and sides. The linework is even and uses no shading, so the design is flat black on skin. The composition fills the upper thigh, with the roses anchoring the bottom and the castle rising toward the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Thigh Castle Rose Star Spire Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The gardener has finally given up on the north wall. Every spring the roses push through the cracks in the mortar, three bushes of them, and every spring Mr Haldane tells me he will pull them out and every spring he doesn't. You would laugh at the state of the place. The turrets have lost their slate and there is a sycamore growing out of the keep window, but the stars are still there. Father had them painted on the gatehouse ceiling the year before the roof went, little four-pointed things, and the damp has turned them the colour of weak tea.

I climbed the old stair on Tuesday with the lamp, the one with the cracked chimney you always said would set us alight. At the top of the east spire there is a small room with a window the shape of a keyhole. Someone had scratched initials into the sill, and under them a row of tiny stars, exactly like the ones on the gatehouse. I stood there longer than I meant to, thinking about the summer we decided the castle was ours and drew it on the back of a seed catalogue, spires first, roses after, because roses were the only thing we could draw properly.

I have decided to leave the roses. The estate can send their men with shears if they like. When the mason comes in April I shall ask him to mend the keyhole window and nothing else, and if anyone asks why the north wall is still a tangle, I will tell them a princess lives there, and they can make of that what they like.

Write soon, and tell Tom the sycamore is his fault.

Margaret