Woman in profile holding a rose on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman's profile with her hair swept up into a bun is tattooed on the outer thigh, her eyes lowered and her head turned to the left. She holds a small red rose near the bottom left of the design, and a faint grey shadow sits behind her head. The linework is clean and dark, the shading is soft grey, and only the rose is coloured, so the piece sits within a circular composition.

Thigh Woman Profile Rose Hair bun Portrait

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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

You find the old art room by its smell before you see it, turpentine and radiator dust, though the school became a sports hall years ago and the easels were folded into a cupboard someone has since locked. The reunion is in the canteen instead, under strip lights that make everyone look like they've just come off a night shift. A man you half remember from the bus queue tells you Mr Feeney died in the spring, and you nod as if you'd already heard.

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Then Jo Kettering, who sat behind you in Year Ten, pushes a folded paper rose across the table. It's from the lamp exercise. Mr Feeney had you trace each other's profiles by a bare bulb, pinning the outlines to black card, then made you cut them out with nail scissors. Yours went missing in the second week. Jo has kept hers in her purse for thirty years, she says, because it was the only time anyone got your jaw right, and she wanted you to know she'd looked at it whenever she needed to remember how you turned your head away from people you didn't want to talk to.

You tell her you stopped drawing. She says she knows. She saw your name once on a gallery wall, in a list of people who hadn't been picked for the summer show, and she thought that was a stupid way to decide anything. Then she asks you to sit sideways in the light from the projector screen, which the caretaker has left humming on its trolley, and she traces your shadow onto the back of a raffle ticket. Her biro moves slowly along the line of your brow, the knot of hair you wore that year, the lowered eyes.

In the car park afterwards you hold the ticket up to the sodium lamp. It isn't a good likeness. It's better than anything you'd have drawn of yourself. In the bottom corner, where the shadow ends, Jo has added a small red rose, the only colour anywhere on the page.