Black line and purple botanical tattoo of roses and vines on an upper thigh, with one rose that appears to glow under UV light.

Rose vine with glowing purple rose on thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A vine with several roses and buds runs up the outer thigh, drawn in black linework with light grey shading on the closed rose buds and leaves. One central rose is filled in violet and purple, and it appears to glow brightly, which suggests UV-reactive ink photographed under blacklight. Curling tendrils and leaves fill the space around the roses against plain skin and a dark fabric background.

Botanical Thigh Rose Vine Bud Leaves Tendril Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marram Ross had kept the walled garden on Eilean Dubh for thirty-one winters, and she knew its roses the way other women knew their neighbours' footsteps. The vine on the south wall had sprawled wild after the wet summer, so she was up the ladder with secateurs when the Oban boat put in early and a stranger came up the slipway carrying a blacklight torch in a canvas bag.

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He was a young man from the mainland, polite and sunburnt, with a letter from a lichenologist in Edinburgh. Callum had written to him twelve years before, asking about the grey crust that grew on the north rocks. Marram had never known her husband to write to anyone. The letter said the crust, ground and steeped, made a dye that glowed under ultraviolet, and that Callum had fed it to the roots of one rose bush, the only one that ever bloomed violet.

She took the young man round to the wall at dusk. He switched off the lamp in the porch, and the bush came alive, its single bloom throbbing pale purple against the stone, the thorns and tendrils picked out in silver. Neither of them spoke. Out on the sound a bell buoy clanged twice.

When he had gone, Marram sat on the step with the torch in her lap until its battery whined and died. Then she went back out into the dark, found the cutting her husband had left in a jar of water, and pressed it into the soft earth beside the wall, where it would take root in spring.