Traditional style tattoo of a black and grey fleur-de-lis with two red and yellow roses and green leaves, placed on the centre of a person's chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fleur-de-lis and two roses on the chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large fleur-de-lis sits at the centre of the chest, with a bold black outline and grey shading along its petals and a banded collar across the middle. A red and yellow rose with green leaves sits on each side of the motif, with thick black outlines and solid colour fills. The image is a close crop of bare skin with a hand resting at the top edge, and the design fills most of the frame.

Traditional Chest Fleur-de-lis Rose Leaf

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the stove, it's older than your mother and twice as cross. You want the story of Ottilie Marsh and the ferry? Right. In the spring of '54 the river came up over Pell's Landing so fast it took the dock planks and half the dogs in town. When the water finally slid back off the mud, the ferry Clementine was lying on her side in the reeds, and Ottilie, who painted signs for the feed store and had never once been asked to paint a boat, rolled up her sleeves and walked down to her with a tin of black enamel and a tin of red.

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She didn't paint the Clementine's name. She painted a lily, tall and sharp as a spearhead, straight down the middle of the hull, the kind her grandmother had cut into the church door back in New Orleans, and she gave it a black edge so thick you could read it from the bluff. Then, because she was a woman who liked to be fair, she set a rose on either side of it, the red going soft to yellow at the heart, leaves dark as cypress shade. Folks came down to scold her for wasting paint on a wreck. By the Sunday they were coming down just to look.

Here's the turn. The men who came to haul the Clementine out couldn't get the chain to bite on any part of her except under that lily, where the wood had been sealed and stayed sound. Ottilie said it was luck. Her sister said it was the roses, that the roses had told the river where to stop. I believe the boat floated because a stubborn woman painted it as if it mattered, and that's the only magic I have ever seen work in this county.

So when you cross on the new bridge tomorrow, look down at the water, and if you see a black lily under the rust, that's Ottilie's. And tell the ferryman I said he still owes me a pie.