Close up of a botanical paisley tattoo on the outer thigh, with dark linework and small blue, pink and purple flower details.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley and flower tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large paisley-shaped design with scrolling vines, leaves and dotted accents fills the upper outer thigh. The thick, dark outlines are set against the skin, and the swirling inner lines give the motif a decorative, ornamental feel. Blue and pink flower petals, a small pink star and purple dots add colour to the otherwise dark linework.

Botanical Thigh Paisley Flower Lotus Star Dot Scroll Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shawl came off the packet boat from Bombay in a tin trunk, folded so tight the paisley had crushed into itself. My father wouldn't let me touch it. He said the wool was older than the lamp and I'd smudge the ink. So I watched from the stairs while he unpicked the creases on the kitchen table, one knot of teardrops at a time, with the wind pushing at the shutters of Scarrow Head.

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The keeper's rule was that nothing rests in the lantern room without a reason. Every spring we scrubbed the brass and oiled the clockwork, and every spring I drew in the margin of the logbook. I copied the curls that swelled from the shawl's border: the long tail that folded back on itself, the vine that ran out of its mouth, a star where the pattern thinned. Mrs Haddow at the post office said the blue flower was a lotus, and a lotus meant rising out of mud. My father said it was just a flower and to stop wasting paper.

The night the fog came in thick as porridge, the Ardent missed the Skerry. I was seventeen and alone in the lantern room because the clockwork had seized and my father was down at the boathouse. I turned the lens by hand, counting each revolution in pencil, and when a answering lamp finally blinked out of the murk I had nothing left to write on but the margin.

He read the log at dawn and found the page crowded with curls and dots, a paisley drawn in pencil beside the tally of hours. He said nothing. He pinned it above the stove next to the shawl, where it still hangs, its tail turning towards the sea.