Floral leg sleeve with red roses

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bare leg is covered in a full sleeve of coloured tattoos, dominated by large red roses with green and tan leaves and fern-like fronds. The linework is bold and dark, with solid colour fills and soft grey shading that gives the flowers depth. The leg is lying across a quilted bedspread, and the tattoo fills most of the frame on the right.

Traditional Thigh Calf Rose Leaves Fern Flower Scale Leg sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had grafted the same red rose onto rootstock for thirty-one winters, and every spring the bud took or it did not. This spring the cold had come late to the valley and the sap ran early, so he went out before matins with a lantern and a knife wrapped in oilcloth, following the south wall where the old damask roses climbed like handwriting.

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The new cutting had been sent from Fenmarch by a novice who swore it would bloom red as a cardinal's hat. Anselm did not believe in cardinals' hats, but he believed in the bark, which was diamond-patterned like a serpent's back and cold when he pressed his thumb to it. He set the bud in the split, bound it with waxed thread, and said the short office over it under his breath, because the abbot liked the garden to be prayed for and Anselm liked the abbot to think so.

By Whitsun the bud had opened into three roses, deep and heavy, with the ferny leaves of the wild sweet briar growing up around them like a tangled choir. Anselm found the novice sitting on the wall with a cup of barley coffee gone cold in his hands, staring at the bloom as though it had insulted him.

"It is red," the boy said.

"It is," said Anselm, and cut one flower for the altar, leaving the other two for the bees.