Traditional colour tattoo on a calf showing a red rose with green leaves, an orange monarch butterfly and a lettered banner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, butterfly and banner on a calf

Traditional · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A woman's lower leg and ankle, with several traditional-style tattoos including a large red rose with green leaves, an orange monarch butterfly, and a banner scroll with lettering. Smaller elements include a dagger, a dark swallow in flight, a yellow flower near the ankle and a small outlined symbol. The bold black outlines and solid fills are set against a grey wall and tan brogue shoes.

Traditional Botanical Ankle Rose Butterfly Banner Dagger Swallow Flower Leaves Ribbon

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 oven door sticks at ten to five, and you hit it with the flat of your palm the way Dolores taught you thirty years ago, before she retired to Margate and stopped answering the phone. Inside, the tray of rolls has come up well, glossy and tight, and the whole back room smells of yeast and burnt sugar. Outside the high window the sky is still the colour of wet slate.

Keep reading

Your brother Kit backs the van into the loading bay at quarter past, engine ticking, the radio turned down to a murmur of shipping forecast. He carries in a crate of cut flowers he bought at Smithfield for the café counter, red roses going soft at the edges, and sets them on the steel table as if he had won them at cards. "Ridiculous price," he says. "Put them in the jug before Mrs Adeyemi sees the bill."

You fill the enamel jug from the tap and trim the stems on the diagonal with the bread knife. The first swallow of the morning throws itself past the skylight, dark against the lightening glass. Kit watches it go. He has the old sailor's habit of counting birds, and he says a swallow means a safe passage, which is the sort of thing he says when he has been awake too long to argue.

By six the first customers are rapping on the window. You pull the shutters, and the warmth rolls out past them into the street. You think about how you will tell Dolores the bread came out right, and how she will pretend not to care. The roses sit in the front window, a little drunk on the warmth, and nobody buys them, which is how you know they were never really for sale.