Close-up of a thigh with colourful traditional tattoos of a yellow rose, a snake and an eye, partly covered by black lace-up shorts.

Traditional rose and snake on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A close-up of a person's thigh and hip with several colourful tattoos, including a yellow rose with a snake coiled above it on the outer leg, and an eye design on the lower leg. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional work, with some grey shading on the hip. Black lace-up shorts and a striped garment partly cover the skin, and a hand rests at the hip.

Traditional Thigh Rose Snake Eye Leaves Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had grown on the north wall of the vicarage garden for longer than anyone in Harrowgate could remember, and it was the only thing the old gardener, Mr Pell, would not let the new boy touch. Its petals were the colour of marigold dipped in honey, and at the base of its stem a snake had made its bed among the roots, thick as a bootlace and gold along the back. Every evening it lifted its head towards the rose and tasted the air, and every evening the rose leaned a little closer, as if it had something to say and no mouth to say it with.

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The boy, Tobias Quill, had been sent to clear the bindweed, and Mr Pell told him the snake had a bargain with the garden. Nobody had written it down. Whatever the rose asked for in June, the snake would fetch before the frosts, and a bargain kept was worth more than a bargain understood. Tobias thought this was nonsense until the June the rose asked for the moon.

That night the snake climbed the drainpipe, slid through the moon's reflection in the water butt, and came back with one eye: round, pale and unblinking, the size of a plum, wrapped in green leaves. It set the eye in the rose's heart. The rose opened wide and watched the lane all summer, and the lane went quiet, because nobody could lie to a garden with an eye in it.

By October the snake was gone and the rose had gone to hips, red as sealing wax. Tobias found the eye lying in the moss one frosty morning, cold and clear, and when he held it to the light he saw the snake curled inside, no bigger than a seed, waiting to be let out. He put it back in the rose and fetched the spade without looking at the wall, because a garden with an eye in it does not like to be stared at.