Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a horned beast face above a red rose in a pink oval, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned beast and rose on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold horned beast face with a golden mane and blue eyes sits at the top of the design, above red and white swirling waves and a gold orb. Below, a red rose is set inside a pink oval panel. The thick black outlines and flat, saturated fills are typical of the neo-traditional style, and the design is centred on the thigh.

Neo-trad Thigh Beast Horn Mane Rose Wave Orb Oval

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning by eleven, and I was counting the last buckets of roses for the third time when the beast came down Chapel Row. Nobody on Saltergate market looks twice at a man in a long coat, but this one had a mane the colour of marmalade and two curled horns that brushed the gutter lamps as he walked.

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He didn't want the fresh stock. He stood at the back of my trestle and pointed at the one red rose in the jam jar, the bloom already browning at the edges, the petals hanging like wet paper. I told him it was past selling. He said he knew exactly how old it was. When he paid, he pressed a gold coin into my palm, heavy and warm, and when I tried to hand it back it rolled under the trestle and into the drain, where it sparked once against the grate and went dark.

He took the rose and tucked it inside his coat, the way you'd shelter a match from the wind. The water running off the stalls parted around his boots and drew back in pale arcs, like a tide that had lost its way. He looked at me for a long moment with eyes like cold bluebells. Then he said, 'Some things only bloom for the one who stops to buy them,' and walked off up Chapel Row without once looking back.

In the morning the jam jar was full of rainwater and nothing else. I found a single red petal stuck to the pavement by the gutter, and when I bent to lift it, something gold caught the light in the drain, waiting for someone patient enough to reach for it.