Man crouching against a wall, showing a black and grey realism tattoo of angelic figures, script lettering and roses across his shoulder, upper arm, back and ribs.

Black and grey angel and rose tattoo across back and arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a muscular, shirtless man in white shorts with red stripes, crouched against a wall with his back and left side turned to the camera. Large tattoos cover the shoulder, upper arm, back and ribs, including winged figures, flowing script lettering and clusters of roses. The shading is grey and black with soft tonal gradients, and the composition is cropped below the head.

Realism Lettering Shoulder Upper arm Back Ribs Angel Wing Rose Script Lettering Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hull plate came off the wreck in one piece, which Teodora took as a bad sign. Someone had painted a name across it in looping script before the cargo ran out of air, and the gilt had worn so long ago that only the grooves remained. Ysolde Marrow, it read. Beneath the name, a pair of drones with folded foil wings had been stencilled side by side, and under them a rose, black as a cinder, pressed into the metal.

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Her partner Dunstan wanted to sell it to the scrap broker at Calder Dock before the third bell. He had a ledger of debts and a hip that would not take the cold of the outer ring. Teodora ran her thumb along the letters and found a smaller line scratched underneath, a row of numbers and then a single word: Greenhouse. The greenhouse on Harrow Moon had grown roses for forty years under a dome of salvaged glass, tended by the same winged maintenance drones, until the seals failed and the air went thin.

They took the plate to Harrow instead, a four-day burn with the hull rattling like loose teeth. The dome was still standing, frosted white at its edges. Inside, among the dead vines, one bush had flowered a deep red in the dark, fed by a heating coil that had kept ticking on its own. A drone with a cracked wing sat beside it, motionless. Teodora fitted the plate into the empty bracket at the base of the bush, and the name lit up faintly in gold.

Dunstan said nothing for a long while. Then he sold nothing, and they stayed through the winter, pruning and listening to the coil. Each morning the cracked drone unfolded its good wing and laid it over the rose, as though to keep the frost off, and each morning Teodora let it be.