Colour neo-traditional style tattoo on the leg of a girl with long blonde hair and a blue bow, holding roses inside an ornate gilded oval frame.

Girl with roses in an ornate frame on a leg

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A girl with long blonde hair, a blue bow and a blue dress is shown from behind, lifting a red rose to her head while holding more roses in her other hand. She sits inside an ornate gilded oval frame topped with scrollwork and studded with small red jewel-like shapes. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft painterly shading in blue, pink, red and yellow on a pale background.

Neo-trad Thigh Girl Rose Bow Blonde hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came into the workshop on a wet Tuesday, wrapped in a bedsheet that smelled of pipe smoke, and Nell Varley knew before she unwrapped it that the picture had been hung the wrong way round for years. Gesso had lifted in curls along the scrollwork at the crown, and three of the small red stones at the base had come loose, so they rattled in the tray like dropped sweets. Inside the gilt oval, a girl in a blue dress stood with her back to the room, one hand raised to a red rose tucked above her bow, another rose held loose at her side.

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Nell spent a week on it. She warmed the rabbit-skin size, laid bole over the cracks, and burnished the gold with an agate stone until her wrist ached. Each evening she left the frame face down on the bench to let the glue set, and each morning there was a petal on the cloth beneath it, pink as the paint on the roses. Nell told herself the shop had a draught. She swept, and the petal came back.

On the Friday she turned the board over to check the stretcher and found a pencilled line on the back: Do not let her see the window. Under it, in a different hand, someone had written the date of the last repair, 1931, and beneath that a row of tiny roses drawn in ink. Nell looked at the bench. A fourth rose had come in overnight, dark as a bruise, lying on the wood beside the agate.

She hung the frame back on its nail above the sink, still facing the wall, because that seemed to be the arrangement everyone had agreed upon. Then she set a saucer of water beneath it, the way her grandmother did for cut flowers, and went home with the workshop lamp still lit.