Close-up of a small black outline Tudor rose tattoo on the outer lower leg just above the ankle, with a bare wooden floor behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tudor rose on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a Tudor rose, with layered petals and a dotted centre, sits on the outer side of a lower leg above the ankle. The lines are thin and dark black with no shading or fill, and the petals are left unfilled against the skin. The photograph is taken from above, with the foot at the bottom of the frame and a round dark object and a wooden floor in the background.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Rose Flower Outline

Find an artist for this

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

Mind the step by the hearth, and sit down before I begin, for my knees are older than this tale and twice as stubborn. You have all heard how the red rose and the white rose tore England in two until the fields ran with both colours. But you have not heard about the dyer's widow in Leicester, who had one son in each army and no way to tell her neighbours which she prayed for more. So she stitched a single rose onto a length of linen, its petals outlined in dark thread, and she sent it to the cathedral with a note that said only, leave the middle open.

Keep reading

The priest hung that linen above the altar, and when the armies came home, the sons of both houses walked past it every Sunday. Nobody filled in the petals. Nobody dared. A red thread would have shamed the white, and a white thread would have shamed the red, so the rose stayed bare cloth and dark line, and the people learned to look at it the way you look at a door you have not yet decided to open.

Years later, a young couple from the two families came to be married beneath that linen. The bride lifted the hem of her skirt at the chancel step and showed her mother a small stitched rose she had sewn there herself, outlined and unfilled. Her mother asked why she had left it empty. The bride laughed and said her grandmother had told her, the middle is for whoever marries in next. That is the whole of it, and the ale is getting warm.