Black and grey traditional-style bouquet of roses and small flowers with leaves on the upper arm.

Black and grey floral bouquet on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey bouquet of a large rose, smaller open flowers and several leaves and stems, all drawn with bold outlines. The rose is shaded with soft grey tones and the other blooms have lighter fills, giving depth. The design sits centrally on the arm against a plain skin background, with a grey sweatshirt sleeve and a blurred wall of framed artwork behind.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Rose Flower Bouquet Leaves Stem Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the lot of you, and pass me that cold tea, because it's gone three and nobody on Ward Seven sleeps before the lift stops. This is about Mrs Ada Penrose in bay four, and the bunch of flowers that came up to the desk every Thursday, though she hadn't lifted a cup on her own since the spring.

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Dennis the night porter reckoned she had an admirer. Sister Morag said a woman who couldn't hold a cup didn't need an admirer, she needed someone to stop sending her roses before she choked on the smell. So on her break, in the drizzle, Morag walked down to the florist on Fore Street and asked the girl behind the counter who was buying them. The girl said an old man with a stick came in every week and asked for the big rose in the middle, the one with the cream fold like a closed fist, two open blooms leaning in beside it, a sprig of little white blossom for the gap, and a dark stem of leaves to hold the lot together.

Morag found him on the bench above the harbour wall with his stick across his knees. His late wife, he said, had painted that exact posy on the lid of every biscuit tin in their house, and he could not walk past a bucket of real ones without his hands wanting to draw them. Forty years Ada and he had not exchanged a civil word, and he was paying the florist to send her roses under her name because he was too proud to climb the stairs and too soft to stop.

Morag carried the bunch back up the hill and set it on Ada's locker without a word. Ada looked at it for a long time, then lifted one finger off the sheet and touched the edge of the nearest petal, and I'm told the whole bay went quiet enough to hear the lift go down. Now drink your tea. The kettle's on.