Neo-traditional tattoo of a pink rose, anemone flowers and acanthus scrolls in grey and blue across the outer thigh, shown in two side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Neo-trad rose and acanthus on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large neo-traditional piece of a pink rose with shaded petals, three anemone-style flowers with black centres, and black leaves and berries, all framed by grey and pink acanthus scrolls with blue ribbon accents. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth shading on the rose and the scrollwork, and the colour is limited to muted pinks, blues, yellows and greys. The image shows the same tattoo twice, side by side, from slightly different angles on the outer thigh.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Rose Anemone Flower Acanthus Scroll Leaves Berry Ribbon

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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

Mr Hallam had the cornice ladder moved twice before he would look at the acanthus, and when he finally climbed it he said the leaves were too soft, like boiled cabbage, and that Iris would have to carve them again before the Easter opening. She had carved them for three weeks already. Her thumbs were split along the knuckles from the gouge handle, and she kept a rag tied round the left one so the lime dust would not get into the cracks.

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She had been given the ceiling of the Argyll Street theatre because old Pargeter had died in February with his chisels still wrapped in oilcloth. Nobody else would climb the scaffold in the cold. So every morning she mixed the putty, pressed the pattern into the gallery above the stalls, and watched the scrolls rise out of the wet like something surfacing. The anemones were the hard part. Pargeter's pattern book had a single line for them: black heart, five petals, sit them loose. She learned to lay a dot of ochre, then drop the centre in with a bristle brush dipped in soot, and by the end of the second week the flowers looked as though someone had pinned them there.

On the last night before the work was sealed, she sat on the top step with a flask of tea and looked up at the pink rose she had painted at the apex of the arch, the one nobody had asked for. Hallam would find it in the morning. Let him. The paint had dried the colour of the inside of a shell, and the blue ribbon looped beneath it like a dropped handkerchief.