Black and grey tattoo of a woodland landscape with a stone cottage, a hill and a bird, framed by ferns and set on the outer thigh.

Woodland landscape with cottage on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A wreath-shaped design shows a woodland scene with tall trees, a rounded hill, a stone cottage with a thatched roof, and a bird on a path. Fine stippled and hatched linework builds the shading, and ferns and leafy sprigs frame the edges and bottom of the composition. The tattoo is rendered only in black and grey on pale skin, with a hand visible at the top left.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Landscape Tree Hill Bird Fern Wreath Path

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

The last bus had gone by the time I reached the canal, so I walked the towpath with my collar up and a paper bag of chips going cold under my arm. Orange light lay on the black water in broken strips. Somewhere behind the gasworks a fox was screaming like a child, and I kept thinking about my grandmother's cottage in the Ashdown woods, where the ferns grew higher than the gate and the path to the door was laid with flat grey stones that rocked when you stepped on them.

Keep reading

She had a rule about that path. You walked it slowly or you didn't walk it at all, because the birds in the hedge would only come out for people who stopped. I never believed her. I believed her less after the solicitor told me the cottage had stood empty for eleven years before she bought it, and that she had re-thatched the roof every spring with reeds she cut herself, as if she were waiting for someone to come up the lane and ask what she was doing.

A partridge stepped out from under the railings ahead of me. It was plump and unhurried, and it looked at me the way she used to look at the postman, measuring whether I was worth the trouble. I stopped walking. The fox went quiet. For a long minute neither of us moved, and a bus I had not known was still running hissed past on the bridge above us and was gone.

When the bird had slipped back into the nettles, I sat on the bench until the chips were cold. Then I took the stone out of my coat pocket, the flat grey one I had carried home from the woods the summer she died, and set it on the bench beside me, facing the water, so that it could see the city too.