Pink cross-stitch style rose with green leaves tattooed on the outer thigh, shown in three photographs against a patterned tiled wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross-stitch rose on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A pink rose with green leaves is rendered in a pixelated cross-stitch pattern across the outer thigh. The blocky stitch-like marks create the petals and foliage, with shading built from lighter and darker squares. Three photographs show close-up and full-length views of the tattoo, with black socks and a short black dress, against a patterned tiled background.

Botanical Thigh Rose Leaves Flower

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

The pattern had to be counted twice before the first thread went in, because the old pixel loom at Mersea Hold rounded every stitch to the nearest square, and a careless girl could lose a whole petal to the rounding. Ysolde had been warned. She sat on the step of the drying shed with a spool of madder red in her lap and the grid pinned flat against her knee, one finger tracing the rows the way her grandmother had taught her to read water.

Keep reading

In Lower Cray they still stitched the year onto cloth. Each family kept one square, a field of tiny crosses, and the square was hung on the well house in the dry months so the sun could check the colours. A rose meant a debt paid. Green leaves meant the sea road was open. Her grandmother Aud had stitched forty-one roses in her life and had never once let anyone see the back of them, because the back was where the mistakes lived, and mistakes were what made a cloth honest.

Ysolde miscounted at the third row. The rose bent east, leaning out of its grid toward the old sea road where the carts had stopped coming, and where the water engineers in their grey coats had promised a pump that never arrived. Aud unpicked three days of work in one evening and then sat very still, looking at the leaning petals for a long while. 'It is not wrong,' she said at last. 'It is pointing.'

They hung the square on the well house at first light. By noon the cress at the rim had gone bright green, and a thin silver line crawled up the stone, a hand's width higher than the day before. Ysolde pressed her palm to the cloth and felt the stitches under her fingers like a row of small, patient doors opening one after another.