Black and grey realism tattoos on a thigh and knee, including a woman's portrait, a rose, peony leaves, script lines and a feather on the lower leg.

Portrait, rose and script on thigh and knee

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated person shows a large black and grey tattoo sleeve running across the thigh and knee. The thigh features a realistic portrait of a woman with flowing hair, a small cross and lines of fine script, while a rose and peony with leaves sit over the knee and a feathered wing shape appears on the lower leg. Shading is soft and detailed, with the image taken casually at close range under indoor light.

Realism Lettering Botanical Thigh Other Portrait Woman Script Rose Peony Leaves Feather Wing Cross Hair

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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

The lift has been out since Tuesday, and the card taped to its doors promises that someone is coming, which someone has promised every Tuesday since spring. You stop on the fourth landing with the shopping cutting into your fingers. The stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday roast, and through the grimy window the painted woman on the gable end of Tollgate House lifts her hair in a wind you can't feel down here.

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Her name was Lorna Dacey, according to a brass plate nobody polishes, and she lived on the ninth floor before the council moved everyone out of the east block. You knew her only as the woman who fed the pigeons from a rose-patterned biscuit tin and said grace over them loud enough for the whole balcony to hear. She wrote on the backs of envelopes, lines about a bird with one wing that kept coming back, and drew a small cross beside every address, as if the post needed blessing before it could reach anyone.

Last week the envelopes stopped. The biscuit tin appeared on the bench by the bins with a pencilled note tucked under its lid. It said the peonies on the balcony wanted cutting back before the frost, and that the spare key was under the cross. You found the cross bolted to the railing at the top of the stairs, dented and rust-freckled, and beneath it a flat brass key wrapped in a page torn from a hymnal.

You climb the last flight with your breath loud in your ears. Her door stands open. The kettle is cold, the balcony is full of drowned flowers, and on the windowsill, squared neatly against the glass, lies a single grey feather. You pick it up and hold it to the light, and you still haven't decided whether to keep it.