Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a large rose with small blossoms and leaves wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose and blossoms on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose sits at the centre of the forearm, with smaller five-petalled flowers, buds and leaves climbing around it. The linework is bold and dark, with the petals and leaves filled in using grey shading to show depth. The image is a close, slightly dark photograph of the arm with the design filling most of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Blossom Bud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last orchard on the Haddow shelf had gone to thorn by the third winter after the dome cracked, and Ysolde Marr walked its rows every morning with a tin pail, because her grandmother had told her a field that was walked was a field not yet given up. The rust had eaten the apples. It had eaten the pears and the damsons too, until only the hedge roses along the old wall were left, black-stemmed and stubborn, throwing out one bloom at a time.

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Ysolde did not trust the roses. They were too like the drawings in the seed-book, the ones the Aldermen burned for paper before the rationing. But the rust had no taste for them, so the roses stayed, and the blossoms that opened pale and then gave way to small five-petalled flowers among the leaves, as if the wall were trying to say something it had forgotten the words for.

On the morning the cutter boats came up the grey canal, a man in a coat of salvaged foil stepped off with a sack and asked for the keeper of the wall. He wanted a cutting. He said the Shelf Council would pay in filtered water for a year. Ysolde took her knife and cut the stem herself, low and clean, and wrapped it in wet moss, and the man did not ask her why she kept the thorned end for herself.

Some say a girl in the lowlands later drew that open rose from memory, bold and dark as the mud it grew from, and pressed the drawing into the skin of her arm so that no one could burn it. Ysolde's wall is gone now. The rose is not.