Traditional style red rose tattoo with green leaves and black outlines on the upper thigh, above black lace stocking tops.

Red roses and leaves on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a thigh with a cluster of red roses and dark green leaves, outlined in bold black linework with solid colour fills. The tattoo sits high on the thigh, with black lace stocking tops and a garter clip below it, and a steering wheel and car seat in the background. The colour ink dominates the composition, with the roses as the focal point.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Rose Leaves Flower Garter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came early over the field at Hallam, and Nell still had two dozen roses to finish on the waltzer's canopy before the bulbs went on. She worked with the tin of black outliner balanced on a crate, brush steady, her other hand holding a rag under each stroke to catch the drips. Her father would be at the generator by seven, cursing the damp, and the convoy would be rolling for Lincoln by Sunday whether the paint had set or not.

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Harold Penney had bought the waltzer in 1962 from a man who owed him money, and he had never let anyone touch its paintwork but Nell. She learned the rose from him, the way he had learned it from a sailor who came through Margate with ink up both forearms: outline first, fill second, leaves last and darkest so the flower looked lit from behind. "Never shade a rose you wouldn't sell a ticket for," he liked to say, and he meant it as a joke, mostly.

The man from the council arrived at half five with an envelope and a clipboard, and Harold came out of the cab with his cap in his hand and his face the colour of putty. Nell watched the envelope change hands and said nothing. When the man had gone, her father sat on the step for a long time, turning the cap round and round.

That night she climbed back onto the canopy with a torch in her teeth and painted one more rose on the inside of the seat-back, where no inspector would look. Black outline, red fill, three leaves. Under the bottom petal she wrote HP in small, neat letters. When the wheel began to turn in the wet dark, the only light on it was the light from that one flower.