Black and grey traditional tattoo of a woman with wavy bobbed hair and a large stippled rose below her shoulders, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with rose on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised portrait of a woman with wavy bobbed hair, shown in profile with bold black outlines and stippled shading on her face and shoulders. A large rose with curling leaves sits beneath her shoulders, filling the lower half of the design. The piece is worked in black ink and grey tones on a lower leg, with partial tattoos visible at the edges of the frame.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Woman Portrait Rose Flower Leaves

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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, the kettle's only just gone off and there's room on the bench if you don't mind the damp. Right. You'll want the one about Mab Corrigan and the rose that wouldn't die, the one they still tell in the back room of the Pelican on Lamb Street when the gas is low. It was the winter of twenty-six and the whole of Sheffield smelt of coal smoke and cheap scent.

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Mab sold flowers from a barrow outside the tram depot, and she wore her hair in a bob that the foreman called a scandal and the landlady called a sin. Every night at ten, a single red rose turned up tucked under the handle of her basket. No note, no name. She decided it was Walter from the rates office, who sang flat in the chapel choir and always lifted his hat too long. She kept the roses in a jam jar on the windowsill until the petals browned at the edges and fell like ash onto the sill.

Then one night the barrow was bare and there was no rose at all. In its place lay a sprig of something grey and thorned, wrapped in a page torn from a ledger. On the page, in careful copperplate, someone had written the price she'd been charged for every bloom she'd ever sold, and beneath that, in pencil that had pressed clean through the paper, the words: you were worth more than you charged. She stood under the gas lamp reading it until the trams stopped running.

She never did learn his name. The jam jar's still on my shelf if you fancy a look. The rose it held was pressed flat and kept between two sheets of tissue, and it's the only one in the city that never went brown. Mind the third step on your way out. It's loose, same as everything else round here.