Woman lying on a white bed showing a black and grey mandala and a red rose with feather detail tattooed on her thigh and hip, in a Geometric and Botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala, rose and feather tattoos on thigh and hip

Geometric · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person lies on white bedding with one leg raised, showing large tattoos across the upper thigh and hip. A black and grey mandala sits on the outer thigh, while a larger design of a skull-like motif, a ring of radiating lines and fine feathered shading covers the leg, and a red rose with dark feathered wings sits on the buttock area. The shading is soft and detailed, with colour concentrated in the rose against the otherwise grey work.

Geometric Botanical Thigh Other Mandala Rose Feather Skull Wing Sun Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps found the windfalls before we did, which my grandfather said meant the summer was finished. He walked the rows of Bramleys with a bucket on each arm, muttering the count, while I carried the tally board and tried not to tread on the fallen fruit. At the end of row nine stood Mrs Hartley's rose, the only thing in the orchard nobody had planted for a crop. It bloomed red every August, even after the frosts, and she used to say it was there to remind the bees they had better get on.

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Mrs Hartley had died in June, and her nephew came down from Leeds with a folder of papers and a surveyor who kept pacing the grass. They wanted the trees gone for a car park. The nephew stood under the rose with his hands in his coat pockets and called it a shame, in the tone people use for weather. I said nothing. That evening I found a jay's feather caught in the gate, and I carried it back up the lane as if it were a pass.

Next morning I laid the windfalls out on the grass in rings, the way Mrs Hartley had taught me to arrange stones for the children at midsummer, one circle inside another, until the whole thing looked like a sun with its rays pulled out. I set the feather in the centre. The surveyor came, looked down, and said nothing at all. The nephew came after him with two coffees, saw the pattern, and went very quiet.

By evening the wasps had found the circle, and the rose was shedding petals onto the apples. We left it all as it was. The nephew drove back to Leeds without his folder, and in September I heard the orchard had been handed to a trust that wanted the old varieties kept. The rose is still there, and the bees are still working it.