Traditional style wreath of orange flowers with black leaves and a red vine wraps around a knee, with a heart tattoo and part of a butterfly visible nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flower wreath around a knee

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A ring of five-petalled orange flowers with dark outlined black leaves and a red-brown vine encircles the knee. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of American traditional work, and the orange and red tones dominate the palette. Partial tattoos of a heart at the upper left and a butterfly wing at the lower right frame the wreath against smooth skin and a white towel.

Traditional Other Flower Wreath Vine Leaves Heart Butterfly

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the crate by your boot, that's the last of the Seville oranges and I'll not have them bruised. You want the wreath story. Everybody wants the wreath story, though most of them have it wrong, saying it was roses. It was never roses. Mrs Pargeter sold orange blossom and marigolds from a barrow beside the fish hall on Quay Street, and she did it for forty winters before the council moved her under the arches.

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The night in question the gas lamps along Quay Street had all gone out at once, which the old men blamed on the tide and the young ones on the council. Rain came sideways off the river. A dockhand called Tobias Reeve stood under the arch with his cap in both hands, because his mother had died that morning and he had nothing to bring to the funeral but a sack of wet coal. Mrs Pargeter took one look at him and began to wind wire.

She built the wreath there in the dark by feel. Five petals to a flower, five black-hearted leaves between each, a red-brown vine going round and round with no start and no stop, so you could never find where she had begun it. She told him that was the trick of it. A thing with no end can't be finished by anyone's bad luck, and it can't be taken off you either.

He carried it up the hill to the church gate and hung it there, and in the morning the vine was still turning in the wind, orange flowers catching the first light. Mrs Pargeter never charged him a penny. She said the price was in the telling, and I have been telling it for her ever since, so there's your penny, and mind the oranges on your way out.