Traditional style tattoo of two clasped hands with cuffs, framed by a rose above and a smaller rose below, on the outer thigh.

Clasped hands and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands clasped together, each wearing a decorated cuff, with a red and black rose above and a smaller rose below. The bold black outlines and solid fills are typical of traditional work, with red used for the flowers and brown for the cuffs. The design sits centred on the thigh, with other tattoos partly visible at the edges of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Hand Clasped hands Rose Flower Cuff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighter of Harrowgate Lane had two sons who never spoke to each other, and their mother asked the night watch to make them shake hands before she died. The watchman, a patient man named Oswin Teale, carried a brass lantern from one end of the city to the other every dusk, and he knew that a promise made over a dying woman was heavier than any coal sack. So he waited for a foggy night when the gas lamps on Mill Row had gone out in a line, and he walked both brothers to the middle of the bridge where the river ran black under the arches.

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The elder brother, Ambrose, would not look up. The younger, Jem, held a rose cut from their mother's window box, its petals already browning at the edges. Oswin set his lantern down between them and said nothing, because the river said enough. After a long while Ambrose lifted one hand from his coat, the cuff of his sleeve stiff with old tallow, and Jem lifted his own, and their fingers met in the cold like two bolts sliding home.

In the morning the lamps along Mill Row all burned again, and nobody could say who had lit them. Oswin still walks the bridge at dusk, and on the far rail someone has tied a red ribbon around a single rose, and the petals never seem to fall.