Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and small blossoms across the outer thigh.

Roses and blossoms on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large cluster of two full roses, smaller open blossoms, buds, leaves and berries spreads across the outer thigh, with the top of the design partly covered by grey shorts. The work uses bold outlines with stippled and dotted shading to build volume in the petals and foliage. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey ink against a plain pale background.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Rose Flower Blossom Leaf Bud Berry

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

Put the kettle on again, love, the lock won't fill for another quarter hour and this bit wants telling properly. You'll have seen the roses on the cabin side of the Wren, the ones that look like they've been breathed on. Ada Penhallow painted those, the winter the Thames came up over Kingsbridge and took every drop of colour her husband owned.

Keep reading

She had no paint left but a tin of soot-black scraped from the stove flue and a dip pen her father used for the lock books. Everybody on the cut told her a rose was not a thing to rush, so she did it the slow way, dot by dot, stippling the petals until the light seemed to sit inside them. The leaves she shaded with little hatched strokes, and where the berries went she pressed the nib down till the ink bled into the wood like rain on a windowpane. It took her eleven weeks in a damp cabin with a paraffin heater that smelled of onions.

When the timber man came to buy the boat in spring, he stood on the towpath with his cap in his hands and asked where the colour had gone. Ada told him the river had washed it off and left only the shapes, which was the truest thing she ever said about anything. He paid her forty pounds over the price and never once asked her to paint over them. The Wren still goes up and down the Grand Union, and if you put your palm flat on the third rose you'll feel a little ridge where her thumb rested while the ink was drying. She never once smudged it.