Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses and leaves across the upper back of a woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a sequin top with an open back.

Black and grey floral tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with a black and grey tattoo of roses and leaves across the upper back, reaching towards the shoulder. The linework is defined and the flowers are filled with soft grey shading. The background is warm and softly lit with fairy lights and red cushions, and the sequined top contrasts with the skin around the design.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the flour sacks, the oven's still ticking and the bread won't be out for an hour. My grandmother's mother baked on this same street in Ancoats, before the trams stopped running past the corner, and she used to say the first batch before dawn is the only honest bread, because nobody's watching it but the Lord and the cat.

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There was a girl came to the back door one February with a tin of grey ash and a broken piping bag. Her name was Hetty Vane, and she wanted a cake for a funeral that nobody had told her how to make. The old baker, Mr Okonedo, gave her a stool and a bowl of sugar, and told her a rose in black is only a rose that has been through a fire. You don't paint the petals light, he said, you let the shadows do the work and leave the light where it falls.

She piped sixty roses that night, each one with four leaves curling off its stem like hands that had given up holding on. By four in the morning her fingers were blue with cold and the icing had set the colour of slate. When the cake went out to the hearse at seven, the mourners said nothing about the cake at all. They touched their own shoulders, one after another, as if the roses had been drawn there.

Hetty never came back to the shop. But every February a tin of ash-grey icing turns up on the step, no note, and the baker lets it sit until the first loaves are out, because that is the honest hour, and nobody is watching but the cat.