Teal flower tattoo with ochre petal edges and brown leaves in a traditional style, on the upper leg, with a partial eye design at the top edge.

Teal flower with leaves on the upper leg

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large teal flower with a pale turquoise centre and orange-brown shading along the petal edges, surrounded by brown and ochre leaves and a small teal bud. A partial tattoo of a red ornate frame with a green eye and gold scrollwork sits at the top edge of the image. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills give a traditional look, and the design is centred on the upper leg against a dark background.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Flower Leaves Bud Eye Ornate frame Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gardener of Harrowmere had been ordered three times to pull up the teal roses, and three times he had gone out at dusk with his shears and come back with his hands empty. The flowers grew along the south wall of the palace, where the frost never settled, and their petals were the colour of the lake in the morning before the mist lifts. Their leaves turned the brown of wet oak in autumn, and no one in the kingdom could remember a summer when they had not bloomed.

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The king's steward, a thin man called Osric Vane, said the roses were unlucky. He had been saying it since the spring the princess went up into the hills and did not come down. The gardener said nothing to him. He knew that the roses opened only when the painted eye above the great gate was looking east, and that the eye, set in its red frame and edged with gold scrollwork, had watched over Harrowmere since before the first stone of the wall was laid. Some said it was the eye of a saint. Others said it was a debt that had never been paid in full.

On the third night the gardener did not cut anything. He sat under the wall with a lantern and waited for the bud to open, and it did, slowly, one petal at a time, until the flower was as wide as his palm. Inside its pale centre, ringed with orange stamens, lay a folded paper sealed with the princess's ring. He read it by the lantern. It was short. She was alive, she had married a shepherd, and she asked that the roses be left alone.

He carried the letter to the steward at dawn. Osric read it twice, then went out to the gate and looked up at the eye for a long while. "Leave them," he said at last, and for the first time in a year he sounded tired rather than cross. The gardener went back to the wall. The bud at the end of the stem was already closing, but it would open again tomorrow, the way it always had, for whoever knew where to look.