Watercolour-style rose tattoo with black linework and green leaves on the thigh, set within a pink and purple wash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour rose on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A rose with a pink bloom, black outline and green stem and leaves sits on the thigh, with a loose purple circular wash behind it. The linework is bold and sketchy, while the pink, teal and green shading blends softly across the skin. The rose is centred in the frame, and a partial tattoo of a ship or bird is visible at the lower left edge.

Botanical Thigh Rose Leaves Stem Watercolour Circle Petal

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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 ballroom at the Pavilion smelt of spilt lemonade and Brylcreem, and Dolores Finch had told me twice already that I'd never get a partner if I kept hovering by the cloakroom. I kept hovering anyway. Every Saturday at nine the band struck up 'Moonglow' and the whole floor turned slowly under the mirror ball, like a pot being stirred with a silver spoon, and I counted the circles from the edge.

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Then Frank Ansell came across from the gents with a single rose wrapped in brown paper from the flower stall outside the station. He'd bought it for his mother, he said, but she was in Ramsgate with her sister and the stem was already going soft in his hand. He wanted to know if I could dance the quickstep. I told him I could dance anything except the Lambeth Walk, and he laughed so loudly that the drummer missed a beat.

We went round the floor until the lights faded to amber and the caretaker began stacking chairs. Frank walked me to the bus stop with his hands in his pockets and never once mentioned the rose, which by then had dropped two petals on the pavement outside the chip shop. I picked up the third and pressed it between the pages of my Pitman's shorthand book, where it stayed for years.

He married a girl from Deal that spring. I married a man who could not dance at all, and we were happy enough, shuffling round the kitchen table to the wireless. Sometimes, when the kettle sings, I open the old shorthand book and find the petal, brown as a teabag, lying across a line I never finished copying.