Colour tattoo of a stylised red rose with green leaves and black linework on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose with green leaves on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stylised red rose with faceted, angular petals sits at the centre of the design, with its bloom shaded in deeper and lighter reds. Thin black lines trail out from the rose and curve around three green leaves on either side. The design is centred on the upper thigh against plain, pale skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Thigh Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Queen of Veldmark wanted a rose in the east window of the Chapel of Saint Imre, and she wanted it cut from ruby glass rather than painted on clear. My master, Brother Tobiah, had blown glass for forty years and had never been asked for a flower that looked folded from paper. He sent me up the scaffold on the third morning of frost because my hands were the steadiest in the workshop and my eyes the youngest.

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The trouble was the petals. Glass wants straight edges and a rose is all curves, so we faceted it instead, each petal a hard angle that caught the light like a cut stone. I built the bloom from three reds, darkest at the heart where the lead came together, paler where the sun would strike at noon. Between the petals I ran the came in long black lines, because Tobiah said a rose must not sit alone. It had to be pulled outward by something it could not quite hold. The lines curled around three leaves of green glass on each side, and the leaves were the only soft thing in the whole window.

The Queen came to see it finished. She stood a long while beneath it with red light falling across her gloves, then asked why the stem was missing. I said the lines were the stem, and that they ran wherever the flower wanted to go. She did not smile. She told me the chapel had enough things that wanted to leave.

That night I climbed back up alone. The moon came through the glass and laid the rose across the flagstones in a red stain, and the black lead ran from it toward the altar and stopped at the foot of the steps, as if the flower had tried to follow the Queen out and been tied fast to the wall.