Black outline tattoo of three roses with leaves and a stem running down the thigh, drawn in a botanical fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline roses on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three open roses with overlapping petals, serrated leaves and a thin stem, all drawn as single black outlines. The linework is clean and even with no shading, so the roses appear flat and graphic against the skin. The design runs diagonally up the leg, with a strip of black lace visible at the lower edge of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Rose Leaves Stem Flower

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down, sit down, the sawdust won't bite you yet. You want the story of the three roses on the wagon side, and you won't get it unless you sit still. Fenwick Shaw painted every banner this show ever flew, and he could make a lion roar off a bill poster. But the winter the big top sagged under the snow, he came to me with a tin of black paint and a face like wet paper, and said he would paint nothing but roses until the spring came back.

Keep reading

Roses, mind, with one line apiece. He would not lift the brush. Lift it, he said, and the flower goes wrong, the petal comes loose from the bud and drops off the page. So he drew three open roses down the flank of the wagon in a single unbroken stroke each, leaves like the teeth of a saw, a stem that ran off the wood at the bottom. No colour. No shading. Just the edges of what a rose would be if you only knew it from the outside.

The wagon was sold in April to a man from Carlisle who wanted it for hay. Fenwick never came back for his tins. I went to see it once, in the yard behind the chandler's, and the roses were still there under the rain, black on grey wood, not a drop of red anywhere, because he had never got round to filling them in.

So when the children ask me why the roses are empty, I tell them the painter was waiting for spring to come back and lend him a colour. It hasn't yet. Sit a while longer, and if you hear canvas flapping somewhere out past the river, that will be the wind, and three roses still waiting for their paint.