Black and grey botanical tattoo of two shaded roses with leaves and buds on the outer upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses on the upper thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large cluster of two roses with leaves and small closed buds sits on the outer thigh of a person wearing a patterned skirt. The petals are rendered with fine black linework and grey shading that gives them depth and volume. The design is in black and grey, and it fills the frame against a brick wall in the background.

Botanical Realism Thigh Rose Bud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second rose had already dropped its outer petals by the time you reached the wall, and Nan stood beside the brick with the secateurs held out like a question. "Not that one," she said. "That one's finished. Take the little hard bud underneath, the one that thinks it's too shy to open."

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You took it. The stem was green at the cut and smelled of rain and something sharper, like pennies. She had you strip the lower leaves with your thumbnail, slant the end with her paring knife, and push it into a jam jar of cold tap water on the kitchen windowsill, where the light came in low over the sink.

"Roses take their time," she said, writing the date on a strip of masking tape and pressing it to the glass. "Six weeks, maybe eight. Don't go poking it to see."

You poked it every morning anyway. You counted the leaves, which stayed at three, and watched the water for clouds. In the seventh week the bud had swelled to the colour of a bruised plum, and you carried the jar out to the back step to show her, but the step was empty and the kettle was cold and nobody came to the door. In June you planted the cutting against the brick where her bushes had grown, and when the bloom finally opened it was blush at the edges and dense in the middle, folded like a letter someone had written and then thought better of. You peeled the old tape from the jar, wrote the date again, and left it on the sill.