Black and grey engraved tattoos on both thighs showing wilted roses with a spider web, a rose bouquet, a cat skull and a snarling cat head.

Roses and cat heads on both thighs

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two rose tattoos sit on the upper thighs: a wilted cluster wrapped in a spider web on the left, and a full bouquet with buds, thorny stems and leaves on the right. Below them, a cat skull on the left and a snarling cat head with several eyes on the right are drawn with fine hatching and stippled shading. The work is entirely black and grey, with tonal depth built from crosshatching and dots against the skin.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Rose Bouquet Spider web Cat Thorn Bud Leaves

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 toll-keeper at Carrow Ford had a rule about flowers. Roses could cross the river only if they were still standing, and he would pluck any bloom off a bundle that looked tired and drop it in the water. Wenna Tull learned this the hard way in October, when the bunch she had carried from her mother's garden shed half its petals on the bridge and sat in her hands like a wet rag.

Keep reading

The toll-keeper's cat sat on the stone beside him. It had no flesh on its face, only the white bone of its jaw and two dark hollows where eyes had been, and it watched her hands the way a clerk watches a purse. 'Name,' it said, though its jaw never moved. She gave her name. The cat tilted its skull and said names were paid for in full, so she gave her mother's too, and her grandmother's, until the list ran out of breath and the cat looked satisfied.

Across the water, on the far bank, the other cat had been waiting. It was not bony at all. It had three eyes set in a row above a furred brow and a mouth full of teeth, and it laughed through all of them as Wenna stepped onto the stones. 'Those are dying,' it said of the wilted bundle. 'Dead things pay in full at the far side. Living things pay in thorns.' Wenna looked at the bundle, then at the bright bouquet her sister Oda had cut that morning and tied with red wool, still standing, still smelling of rain.

She gave the cat the bouquet. It took the roses one by one, every stem pricking its paw, and it hissed without letting go. The toll-keeper's boat drifted back empty to the reeds. Wenna crossed with the wilted cluster, which weighed nothing now, its heads held together by nothing but the spider's web.