Bare legs raised against a pale wall, showing a red rose with dark flowers on one thigh and black script lettering with flowers on the other thigh, in a traditional style.

Rose and script tattoos on raised legs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

Two legs are raised against a plain pale background, with a woman wearing dark shorts with white trim at the hip. A large rose in red and purple with dark leaves and flowers sits on one thigh, while black script lettering with small flowers sits on the other, both in bold, solid linework. Several smaller black tattoos appear on the knee and lower leg, and the colour is mostly limited to the red and purple of the rose against the skin tone.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Calf Rose Flower Leaves Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You climb the north tower stair at Carrickmoor with the key your aunt left you in an envelope marked for the hearth. The rain has got into the lime mortar and the steps are soft as cheese. Halfway up, a rose has forced itself through a window gap, its stem thick as a wrist, its flowers dark red going purple at the edges. Beneath it, the family motto is cut into the lintel in letters half worn away: LET THE SMALL THINGS KEEP.

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Your aunt Maud never explained the motto. She only said it was the reason the castle had not been sold for scrap in 1952, when the council wanted the stone for a bypass. Inside, the great hall has no roof, and nettles stand where the table used to be. You find the hearth, and in its soot a tin box, and in the box a bundle of letters tied with garden twine, each addressed to a man called Edwin Dacre who never came home from the war.

The letters are from a woman named Ada Quill, who kept the rose garden. She wrote every Sunday for eleven years, and each letter holds a pressed flower between its pages. The last one is dated the week the castle was shut up. It says only: The rose is still flowering. Do not let them cut it. You sit on the cold flagstone with the petals flattened in your palm and understand that the lintel was never the family's motto at all.

You walk back up to the window before you leave. The thorns catch your sleeve, and you let them. Then you take a strip of the twine and tie it loosely around the stem, so that whoever comes next will know someone was asked.