Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large five-petal flower, a daisy and leaves on a thigh, with part of a butterfly visible at the lower right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral bouquet tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a large five-petalled flower with a daisy-like bloom, leaves and sprigs arranged as a bouquet. Bold outlines are combined with fine shading and hatching on the petals and leaves. The design sits on the outer thigh, with a partial butterfly tattoo cropped in the lower right corner.

Botanical Blackwork Thigh Flower Bouquet Daisy Leaves Butterfly Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mist had not lifted off the cut by the time Nell Pargeter loaded the last bundles of rooted sprigs into the Dorothea's stern hold, and her father was already cursing the lock gates at Hungerford. He stood on the towpath with his cap pushed back, shouting at the keeper's boy, while she packed damp moss around the cuttings so they would survive the three days to Reading. Every bundle had a paper tag in her own square hand: mallow, aster, bramble, and the pale campion her mother used to call five little kings.

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The widow Vane was waiting at a green wooden jetty below the bridge, a shawl over her shoulders and her gloves already on. She counted the bundles aloud, touching each tag as if it were a name. When she reached the last one she stopped, lifted a sprig of aster to the light, and asked where her father had found it. Nell's father looked at the water. Years ago, he admitted, he had taken a cutting from that very bed on a dare, and it had grown in the barge's bow box ever since.

A dark butterfly came down onto the aster while they stood there, folding and unfolding its wings on the bloom as though it had been sent to inspect the goods. Mrs Vane laughed, the first real sound Nell had heard from her, and said her husband had always claimed flowers carried on water remembered their first garden. She pressed a coin into Nell's palm and asked for the stolen cutting back, planted properly this time.

They pushed off before noon with the hold lighter by one debt and the bow box empty. For a mile the butterfly kept pace above the towpath, rising and dropping over the reeds, until Nell lost sight of it at the next lock and found she was still holding the paper tag with her mother's campion written on it.