Black line tattoo of two roses and an ornate filigree oval on the outer thigh, with a dotted line trailing below.

Roses and filigree oval on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of two open roses with leaves wraps around an ornate oval panel filled with swirls, scrollwork and small circles. A dotted line runs from the roses down across the thigh. The lines are single-weight and the image is in black ink only, with no shading. The photograph is taken from above and shows a bare thigh and knee on a dark blue bedspread.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Rose Filigree Oval Swirl Dotted line Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate-keeper of Vell had a cabinet of brass oval plates, each one engraved with a different pattern, and every night he took one out and turned it under the lamp so the scrollwork caught the light. The town children called it the rain cabinet, because when the plates were polished the streets after dark smelled of wet stone. Nobody in Vell asked where the plates came from. They asked only whether the gate would open, and it always did.

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One November a woman came up the hill road with a dotted line of salt on her cloak, as if she had walked through a field of frost and carried some of it away. She had two roses stitched to her wrists and no coin. The gate-keeper looked at the roses a long while and then took down the oval plate with the little circles, the one the old people called the lantern of bees. He held it out to her. She laid her palm flat on it, and the circles went warm, and the roses on her wrists opened by one petal each.

What she needed, she told him, was a road that did not exist yet. He said the road was in the cabinet too, if she was patient enough to find the right swirl. They sat up together until the lamp burned low, tracing curls with their fingers and naming the shapes. Some were gates. Some were the sound of a bell under water. The last one was simply a door with no lock.

In the morning the gate-keeper found the cabinet drawer open and the lantern of bees gone, and on the stone sill a dotted trail of salt leading down the hill towards the sea. He did not follow it. He took the other plates out one by one and polished them, and in the window the roses kept their shape against the frost.