Crossed legs showing black and grey tattoos on the thighs, including script lettering, a cluster of roses, a crescent moon with a face and a figure in a hood.

Script, roses and moon tattoos on crossed legs

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two crossed bare legs display several black and grey tattoos, including script lettering near the knee, a cluster of roses on the outer thigh and a crescent moon with a face on the upper leg. A large figure with flowing hair and a hood sits on the inner thigh, alongside a dark winged motif at the top edge of the frame. The shading is soft and layered in greys, and the composition is a close, casual crop with a hand resting on the leg.

Lettering Botanical Thigh Script Rose Moon Woman Figure Flower Bat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the scarp takes the words if you hold them too far away. You want the Lady of Hollin Keep, I'll tell you, but first you'll pour me that cup, because my throat has been dry since the miller's boy came up asking the same question. Hollin was never a castle anybody finished. The roses went up its walls the year the bell fell, and nobody cut them back, because the roses were the only thing in the place that kept its promises.

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The Lady came up the valley in a hooded cloak in the month the moon was thin as a paring. She carried a letter sealed with black wax, and the words on its face were in a hand no clerk in the county could read, curling back on themselves like smoke. Lord Aldous took it from her at the gate. He read it by a single tallow candle and laughed until he coughed, then sent her to the old chapel to wait for her answer. A bat dropped from the rafters, the only messenger the chapel ever had, took the reply in its teeth and flew out over the moat.

Each night after that the crescent moon rose over the battlements with a face in it, and the face looked down at the chapel and counted the roses. Aldous grew thin. He wrote a dozen replies and burned every one, because the Lady had only ever asked for the one word, and he could not bring himself to say it.

On the last night of the thin moon the roses had climbed the chapel door and sealed it shut. Come morning the Lady was gone, her cloak folded on the altar, and the letter lay open on Aldous's own pillow. The word he had refused to write was there in his own curling hand, and beneath it, smaller, the hour he would die. So if you go up to Hollin, mind the roses. They are only keeping the door for whoever finally says the word.