Black and grey botanical tattoo of blossoms and leaves across the shoulder and upper arm, with a shaded rose, worn by a person in a striped black and white halter top.

Black and grey flowers on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a person's shoulder and upper arm showing black and grey tattoos of dogwood-style blossoms, leaves and a shaded rose. The linework is clean and the greys are softly blended to give the flowers depth. The person wears a black and white optical-pattern halter top against a pale background, and the tattoos are partly cropped at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Flower Blossom Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dogwood came down the lane on a cart on the first Tuesday of March, wrapped in wet sacking, and Ada Pell would not let the carter lift it off until she had looked at its roots. They were white and fine as thread. She told him it would live, and he looked at her as though she had told him the moon was made of cheese, but he was paid the same either way.

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Her colours had gone damp in the Bristol carrier's wagon, so for a month she worked in what she had left: soot scraped from the kitchen range, mixed with gall and a little rainwater. The blossoms she painted as bare paper, leaving the four petals untouched and shading only the edges, so they seemed to hold the light the way a pane of glass does. Her brother Tom sat on the wall with his boots off, complaining that a flower with no colour was a sorry thing to show a man going to the Cape.

"It was white in the churchyard for a hundred years before anyone troubled to name it," she said. "Grey is only white that has been looked at for longer." He laughed and told her she sounded like the vicar. She did not tell him the rose on the cottage wall had begun to fade the same way, a little more each summer, and that she had drawn it twice already so she would not forget its shape.

Tom sailed in April with the sketchbook buttoned inside his coat. The next letter came in October, and folded inside it was a page of dogwood, grey washes gone soft where the rain had reached it. In one corner was a pressed petal, pale pink faded to the colour of weak tea. It was the only colour left on the whole sheet, and he had written beneath it, in a hand that was not quite steady, that he had kept it in his pocket through two fevers.