Close view of black cycling shorts printed with grey traditional-style roses, snakes and daggers, with a black and grey floral tattoo on the thigh below the green waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattoo-print cycling shorts with a tattooed thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close, angled photograph of black cycling shorts with a grey traditional-style print of roses, snakes and daggers, and green lettering reading CASP Performance Cycling. Below the shorts' green band, a black and grey floral tattoo with bold outlines and simple shading is visible on the upper leg. The background is softly blurred foliage and stone, keeping the focus on the print and the tattoo.

Traditional Thigh Rose Snake Dagger Floral

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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

The sheets arrived in a biscuit tin, forty years of pencilled roses and daggers gone soft at the corners, and Ruth Calloway spent three Thursday evenings deciding which of them could survive being stretched across a pair of cycling shorts. Most could not. A dagger drawn for a forearm looks thin and nervous when it wraps a thigh, and the snakes wanted to swallow the seams. She kept the rose with the heavy black petals, the one whose outline thickened where the old hand had pressed harder, because it read clearly at forty feet and at four inches.

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The studio in Burnley ran proofs on a flatbed printer that smelled of hot plastic. The client wanted a green band across the leg, lettering running up the side, and every motif sitting whole rather than sliced by a join. So Ruth cut the pattern pieces around the flash the way a tailor cuts around a plaid, nudging a dagger a centimetre to the left and tucking the snake's tail back under the rose, until the whole thing looked as if it had grown there.

The second proof came back with the rose turned the wrong way round. Ruth nearly sent it back, then held it up to the window and saw what the printer had done. The flower now faced the outer edge of the leg, as if it had been drawn for someone looking at it in a shop mirror. She signed it off. In the last pair, the one she sewed herself at the bench with the lamp pulled low, she left a thread of blue chalk along the inside seam, the same mark the old artist used to make on his stencils, so that anyone who turned the shorts inside out would still find the line.