Seated person on grass with botanical tattoos on the legs, including a swallow on the knee, a pink rose on the shin and a lily with leaves on the thigh.

Swallow, rose and lily tattoos on legs

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person sits on grass in a grey dress, with bare legs in view. A swallow in flight sits near one knee, a pink rose lies on the shin, and on the other leg a pink lily with green leaves and a larger faded rose run across the thigh. The linework is soft and the shading is light, with muted pink and grey-green fills that give a faded, vintage botanical look. The close, low-angle composition centres the legs against green grass.

Botanical Thigh Calf Swallow Bird Rose Lily Flower Leaves Leg Grass

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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, you'll want the kettle on for this one, because my mother's stories never went down without tea. Sit there, Danny, and mind the range, it's still warm from the morning.

Keep reading

Eighty-odd years ago the coaster Margaret Ellen cleared the Humber with a hold full of pit props and a cook called Abel Fenwick, who had only signed on because his wife slipped a packet of lily bulbs into his coat. He never planted them. He kept them in a biscuit tin on the galley shelf, next to the salt and the bread knife, and every voyage he'd take them out, turn them over in his palm, and put them back.

Off Spurn Point a swallow came aboard, soaked through and too tired to go on. Abel fed it crumbs of ship's biscuit and it stayed three days, perching on the rail above the stove and dropping feathers into the gravy. When the weather turned it wouldn't leave, and on the fourth morning he found it dead on the sill with its wings folded like a pair of spectacles. He buried it at sea in a tin of mixed fruit, the only box he had that was the right size.

What I always end on is what he did with the bulbs. He went ashore at Sunderland, rented a scrap of ground behind a chapel and planted the lot, lilies and a climbing rose a widow gave him over her wall. Some folk say the flowers came up pink as a sunburnt cheek, and that a swallow nested in the eaves above them every summer after. Abel never said whether it was the same bird. He just stood at the gate each spring with a mug of tea going cold in his hand, waiting for the first one to dip low over the lilies.