Black and grey floral leg sleeve with roses, foliage and script running from ankle to thigh, with the leg raised against a wooden jetty.

Floral leg sleeve with script

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A raised leg is covered from ankle to upper thigh with a large floral sleeve, including roses, leaves and what appears to be a figure or flowing shape at the thigh. Thin lines and soft shading create depth in the petals and foliage, with script lettering running along the side of the leg. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink, set against a blue sea and sky with a weathered wooden jetty in the background.

Botanical Realism Thigh Calf Ankle Rose Flower Leaves Script Lettering Figure Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea had already swallowed two of the letters by the time Demetrios let me hold the chisel. We worked the jetty at Ostia through the summer, where the old timbers leaned out over the water like tired men, and every morning he chose a fresh length of Greek verse for the pier posts. He liked a poem that could be read from a boat.

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The roses were my idea. Demetrios said a rose on a post was wasted stone, since nobody sailing past would look at anything but the water, but I drew them anyway, petals curling over the lettering, leaves spreading down the grain. He let me keep the drawings. In the evenings I shaded them with charcoal from the baker's oven, rubbing until the petals sat deep and soft, and the fishermen started calling the posts the leaning gardens.

The figure was the last thing we cut, a woman of the tide rising out of the stone at the ankle of the largest post, her hair running into the foam carved at her knee. Demetrios would not say who she was meant to be. He only told me to make the water look as if it were pulling at her, and to keep the lines thin so the rain would not fill them.

When the storm came in October it took the lowest verses clean off the timber, and the next morning I walked the shore with my hands tucked in my tunic, reading what remained. Half a line of Sappho, a leaf, the curl of a petal. I could still make out the first word of the poem, which was the name he had asked me to carve in the middle of the post. I carved it again, deeper this time, and the sea has not yet come for it.