Close-up of a small fine line leaf wreath tattoo in dark grey ink on the outer thigh of a person wearing khaki shorts.

Small leaf wreath on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A small circular wreath of thin leaves and sprigs is drawn in fine, delicate linework on the outer thigh. The ink is a single dark grey tone with no shading, and the leaves are sparse, leaving an open centre. The skin is shown in soft daylight with the shorts rolled above the tattoo and an out-of-focus street behind.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Wreath Leaves Foliage Circle Sprig

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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

Right, pull your chair in, because this one is about Mrs Pargeter's wreath and the summer the church bells got stolen. You'll want to hear it before the reunion tea, while the urn is still rattling. Nobody at Holcombe Grammar ever found the bells, mind, but they found the wreath, pressed flat in the hymn book on the second pew, a circle of ivy and bramble somebody had twisted with more patience than sense. It was Eileen Pargeter's, and she had been waiting forty years for someone to ask her where it came from.

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The boys who took the bells were Stanley Hobb and the Wrigley twins, and they were not clever boys. They had a handcart and a plan involving a rope ladder from the scout hut. What they did not have was anyone to tell them that bells are heavier than they look when the tower is wet. By the time the constable came up the lane, the boys were sitting on the churchyard wall with their hands in their pockets, and Eileen was standing at the lych gate holding the wreath like evidence.

She never told the constable about the wreath. She told him instead that the ivy was for her mother, who had died in March, and that she had woven it on the wall where the bells hung so the sound would come through the leaves. He did not believe a word of it, and he let the boys go home, and in the morning the bells were back in their frame as if nothing had happened. Nobody ever asked how. I have my own opinion, which is that a wreath can hold a great deal of weight if you make it round enough.

So when you see the young man in the corner with a little ring of leaves on his leg, don't go asking him about it. Just nod, and pass him a biscuit.