Traditional rose and script lettering tattoos on the thighs of legs resting in a bath, with a hand holding a cup of tea.

Rose and lettering tattoos on bathed legs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two legs rest in bath foam while a hand holds a cup of tea beside them. A red and black rose sits on one thigh, and the other thigh carries black script lettering, a butterfly outline and small ornamental shapes. The bold outlines and rose shading are set against pale skin and soft, light-toned bathwater.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Rose Lettering Script Butterfly Flower Diamond Teacup

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cup came back to the Hollis Street tearooms in the second week of October, wrapped in a page torn from a seed catalogue. Someone had drawn a red rose on the paper in biro, and the cup itself still held a dark ring of tea at the bottom, as though it had been set down in a hurry. Nell Marsh, who ran the counter and had never once lost a saucer, turned the cup over and found a chip on the foot shaped like a small diamond. She knew that chip. She had washed it a thousand times without thinking.

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The note under the saucer was in pencil, in a looping hand that leaned hard to the right. "Dear Mrs Pryce, the tea was too strong and the bath far too cold, but I kept the cup, because you once told me nothing is really lost until nobody wants it back. I want it back. Yours, Ada." Nell had no Mrs Pryce on her books, but she did have a tin of old receipts from the years before the war, when the shop was owned by her aunt. She sat on the step with the tin on her knees and sorted through them until she found a bathhouse slip from Ramsgate, dated 1931, with a butterfly sketched in the margin and the word Ada written beside it in the same looping pencil.

She spent three evenings with the ledger and a cup of stewed tea, tracing a woman who had come to the seaside to rest her legs and had stayed to write letters she never posted. Nell found no Ada alive in any register, only a headstone in Ramsgate with a rose carved on it and the words Wanted Back. She did not know what to make of that, so she made tea instead.

On the last Saturday of the month she filled the cup to the brim, set it in the window with the chipped foot turned towards the street, and laid a second cup beside it for whoever came asking.