Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, blossoms and leaves on the side of a thigh, in a traditional outlined style.

Rose and blossom thigh piece

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two large roses, two smaller five-petalled blossoms, leaves and buds is tattooed on the side of the upper thigh. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft grey shading giving the petals depth and the leaves a rounded form. The image is in black and grey, and the composition runs diagonally from the top right down to the bottom left of the frame against a plain background.

Botanical Traditional Thigh Rose Blossom Flower Leaf Bud Petal

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 rambler by the shed had gone to a tangle nobody could rescue, so Dad took the secateurs to it on the Saturday and I stood in the wet grass holding the bin bag open. He cut without looking, the way Nan used to, talking over his shoulder about the price of compost and whether the council would ever fix the gate.

Keep reading

Nan had planted the two old roses the year I was born. One was a deep cabbage type that went papery at the edges by July, the other a pale pink that smelt of cold tea and pennies. She fed them with a bucket of nettles she left to rot behind the greenhouse, and the whole plot stank of it, and she said that was how you knew they were working.

By the afternoon the bags were stacked by the fence and Dad had gone in for the kettle. I went looking for anything worth keeping. Under the leaning arch of the pink rose, half hidden by dock, there was a bud still closed tight, its outer petals edged in a brown that looked like pencil shading. I knelt in the mud and took it between two fingers. It was hard as a marble, and I thought of the pressed blossoms Nan kept in the seed catalogues.

I wrapped it in a sheet of the Yorkshire Post, damp at one corner, and put it in my coat. Dad saw me do it and said nothing, only handed me a cup of tea and tipped his head at the fence. Nan would have said it wouldn't take. I planted it in a pot on my windowsill that night, and I have been watering it ever since, which is the only thing I know how to do with her roses.