Black and grey full leg sleeve tattoo with roses, a woman's portrait and script across the thigh and calf, photographed with legs raised on a wooden pier.

Full leg sleeve with roses and portrait

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on a wooden pier with both legs raised, showing a full leg tattoo sleeve that runs from the foot to the upper thigh. The design includes a large portrait of a woman with flowing hair, surrounded by roses, leaves, rays and lines of script, with a small black cross on the inner thigh. The work uses fine linework and soft grey shading in black ink against a blue sea and cloudy sky.

Realism Botanical Lettering Thigh Calf Ankle Rose Script Cross Leaves Hair Sleeve Feet

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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

You are the last one still painting the banner at the Harrowgate Winter Circus, up a ladder in a frosted field outside Doncaster, while the lorries sit with their tyres gone soft. The woman on the canvas has hair the wind keeps lifting off the page, so you have spent three nights on it, grey wash over grey wash, until the strands look like smoke. Roses climb her shoulders in ink the damp keeps softening. Along the border you have lettered the verse the ringmaster asked for, the one he swears his mother sang before the fire took the big top in 1971.

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Mr Okonedo comes out at dusk with two mugs of tea and no patience left. He tells you the crowds have stopped coming, that the elephants went to a sanctuary in Wales in October and the clowns found work at a garden centre near Selby. Then he looks at the woman's face for a long time. "She walked the wire without a net," he says. "Fell once in Leeds and lived. Never came back to the ring after that." You ask what became of her. He shrugs the way people do about the things they loved most.

You finish the small black cross in the corner last, where the paint runs thin, because somebody ought to mark where a fall was survived. When you climb down, the grass has gone white and the canvas has stiffened like card. Mr Okonedo folds the tea towel over his arm and says the banner will go up in the spring, whether there is a spring or not.

In March it hangs over an empty car park with the wind in its hair, and the roses are the only thing on that stretch of road still in bloom.