Neo-traditional botanical tattoo on a thigh showing a pink rose, lavender lupin spray, green leaves with red outlines and a small ladybird.

Rose and lupin bouquet on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A pink rose with a lavender lupin spray rises diagonally across the thigh, with green and black leaves and a small red ladybird near the base. The rose and leaves use bold black outlines with soft pink and green shading, while the lupin flowers are rendered in pale lilac. The design is centred on the rose, with the lupin stems and sprigs of foliage balancing the composition to the upper right.

Botanical Neo-trad Thigh Rose Leaves Ladybird Flower Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose at Thornbury Cross had never bloomed in the hard years, and everyone in the village said it was because old Mrs Penrose had cursed the ground when her husband was taken at Dunkirk. Nobody believed it, but nobody planted near the wall either. In the spring of 1953 Ada Quill cut a single stem from it anyway, wrapped the end in wet sacking, and carried it down the lane past the lupins that grew wild along the verge.

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She took it to the lock-keeper's cottage, where a widower named Tom Ashby kept bees and a poor temper. He looked at the stem, then at her, and said a rose would only take if somebody gave something to the ground first. Ada had nothing to spare but her good shoes, so she pressed them into the earth by the lock gate, toes down, and walked home barefoot in the rain. A ladybird crawled out of the sacking and up her wrist, red as a pillar box, and she let it stay.

By June the cutting had put out three dark, glossy leaves and then a bud the colour of a shell. The lupins along the verge stood tall and lilac that year, more than anyone could remember, and the bees came in droves. Tom walked up the lane to see what the fuss was and found Ada on her knees in the lupins, not picking anything, just counting the flowers aloud as if the number mattered.

The rose opened in the first week of July, full and blush-pink and heavy in the head, and it smelled of rain on warm stone. Tom cut the first bloom and carried it down to the lock. Ada never got her shoes back, but she said the ground had taken a fair price, and she was content to call it square.