Black and grey realism style portrait tattoo with roses and script on the outer thigh of a woman in black bikini bottoms.

Portrait and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in black bikini bottoms and a black cropped top is photographed from the waist down, with her head out of frame. A shaded tattoo on the outer thigh shows a woman's face with skull-like shading, surrounded by roses, with scrolling script partly visible at the side. The tattoo uses black ink and grey tones on smooth, tanned skin, against a plain white background.

Realism Thigh Portrait Woman Rose Skull Script

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

The damp had got into the east gallery the winter after the roof went, and by the time Mr Ansell sent me up with a bucket of lime wash, the portrait over the fireplace had lost most of its paint. Only the face held. A woman looked down at the hall with a grey, rotted cheek, the shading showing through the powder like a joke nobody had explained to her, and round her shoulders someone had painted roses so dark they read as bruises.

Keep reading

I was nineteen and paid by the day, which is why I was the one sent. Nobody else would climb the scaffold to scrub at a dead woman's cheek. I worked with a sponge and a bent palette knife, and under the grime I found a ribbon of script curling off the frame in the old copperplate hand, half eaten by the wet. I could make out the words 'and the roses keep' before the plaster crumbled under my thumb.

Mrs Ansell, widow of the last owner, came up the stairs on her stick to watch. She said the painter had been paid in cider and never finished the hands. She said the woman had asked to be painted with a skull beneath her face, so that people would look at her and never quite look through her, and that a girl who looked closely enough would find the roses were the only honest thing in the room.

I cleaned the whole cheek that week, down to the grey shading, and on my last evening the light through the broken window caught the lime on my wrist like pale ink. I still have the sponge. Some nights I think I should have left the roses dark and let the face go back to bone.