Black and grey rose tattoo on the back of a hand, with a diamond and script lettering on the thigh above it.

Rose on hand and diamond and script on thigh

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's hand rests on her thigh, showing a shaded black and grey rose across the back of the hand and wrist. On the thigh, a faceted diamond and bold script lettering reading "LOVE IS POISON" are partly visible, with a second rose lower down. The soft lighting and close framing keep the focus on the linework and grey shading, while a gold ring and pale nails sit against the dark tights.

Botanical Lettering Hand Thigh Rose Diamond Script Lettering Ring

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 hedge had been planted to keep deer out of the turnips, and for a hundred years nobody in Harrowden Edge thought about what grew behind it. Then Tom Pardoe cut through with a billhook one wet May and found roses, grey-black in the shade, petals like wet slate. My mother wouldn't let them in the house. She said a rose that blooms without sun is only waiting for a reason.

Keep reading

Abel Crane, the glazier who came up from Lewes every spring to mend the chapel windows, saw them and went quiet. He had a stone in his waistcoat pocket, a diamond cut from the broken chandelier at the old Hallam place, and he turned it in the light until it threw small green fires across the bracken. Cut things hold light, he told me, the way a grudge holds a person. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Nell Pardoe pressed one bloom into her prayer book the week before the wedding, because Tom had picked it for her with his own hands. By the time the banns were read the pages smelled of bitter almonds, and Tom stopped coming to the forge. Nobody said the word poison in church. We painted it on the lych-gate instead, in white letters the rain had taken by Candlemas, and still the whole parish could read them.

I went up the path with Abel's stone in my pocket and a jar of honey, meaning to trade one sweet thing for another. The roses had already dropped their petals onto the moss. I set the diamond among them, facing the sky, and watched it catch the last of the sun until the green fire was gone and only the stone was left, cold and clear and asking nothing of anyone.