Black and grey shaded rose with leaves on a thigh, beside fine script lettering on the other leg, with both legs resting in a bath.

Shaded rose and script tattoos on legs

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs rest in a bath of soapy water, showing a black and grey rose with shaded petals and leaves on the outer leg and a smaller flourished script design on the other. Lower on both legs, larger script lettering with swirling ornamental strokes is cropped by the frame. The shading is soft and greyscale, and the composition is close, with the tattoos sitting in the centre of the image.

Botanical Lettering Thigh Rose Leaves Script Lettering Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashdown had been grafting roses behind the Lea Street bakery for thirty years, and she could tell a union had taken by the colour of the bark around the cut. Tonight the rain had turned the gravel to black glass, and the only lamp that mattered was the bulb over the potting bench. Her brother had left a crate on the back step with a note wedged under the twine: Mum's Albertine, the last of them. Do what you can, Nell.

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She knelt on a folded feed sack and worked the knife along the stock. The rootstock was wild dog rose from a hedge off Dalston Lane, pale and thorny, and the scion was a shaded grey-pink climber their mother had trained up the washing line for forty summers. Under the lamp the petals on the cutting looked as if they were folding inward, layer over layer, the way the bloom had always seemed to shut its own door. Across the rooftops the church clock struck eleven, and she lost count of the strokes.

She bound the join with raffia and tied a card tag to the stem. Her mother had always written the names of her roses in the same looping hand, all flourishes and curled capitals, so Nell copied it carefully from memory, the R swinging out like a hook. She had got halfway through the second word when the gate banged and her brother came up the path with his collar turned up and two paper cups of tea going cold in his hands. He stood over the bench and read the tag without saying anything. Then he sat on the crate and held out a cup.

By dawn the rain had stopped and the yard smelt of wet earth. The graft had held through the night, and the first green swelling showed at the bud where the wood had been cut. Nell tied the pot to the fence with the card still swinging, the ink run a little in the damp, and went in to wake the kettle.