Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stylised woman's face with a rose, rosebuds and leaves above it, on the thigh.

Geometric portrait and rose on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised woman's face is shown in angular, faceted planes, with the eyes, brows and lips drawn in fine outline. The face and neck are shaded with stippled dots, and a large open rose with leaves and buds sits above the head. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, filling the upper thigh with a tall, centred composition.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Thigh Woman Portrait Face Rose Rosebud Leaves Stipple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's daughter had been sent up to Harrow Keep every morning for a month, and every morning the rose was in the same place, climbing the north wall where the stone had split like a loaf. Her father said it was a weed. The steward said it was a sign the lord would never come home from the crusade. The girl said nothing and carried her bucket of lime up the stairs.

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On the twenty-third morning she found a face in the wall. No hand she knew had carved it. The stone had broken along a line so clean it looked planned, and the two halves made a woman's face turned a little to one side, one cheek lit and the other in shadow, the mouth shut hard. Lichen spread over the jaw like grit from a dry sea. Above it the rose had pushed through the crack, its open head black on one side and white on the other, and its buds hung down like small closed fists.

She laid her palm against the cold cheek. It did not move. She went home and told her father the wall had a face, and he laughed and said that was what came of too much sleeping in the hot months.

She went back the next day with a chisel and her mother's blessing, and she set the chisel to the seam. The stone gave. Behind it was a small room no one had entered in two hundred years, with a single rosebush rooted in a crock of earth, flowering in the dark. Beside it lay a lord's ring and a letter folded to a hard square, with her name written across the front. She could not read it. She carried it down anyway, and the rose kept its place on the wall behind her.