Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large rose on the back of a hand, with flowers and leaves running up the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose and flowers on forearm and hand

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose covers the back of the hand and wrist, with smaller open flowers and leaves extending up the forearm. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with stippled dots and soft grey shading to give depth and volume. The design is entirely in black and grey ink against pale skin, with the arm angled diagonally across a plum-coloured garment and a patterned background.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Hand Rose Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Ashcombe House had been broken since Tuesday, so Joan Okafor took the stairs with a carrier bag of compost on one hip and the cutting wrapped in damp newspaper under her arm. Fourteen floors. The stairwell smelt of bleach and somebody's Sunday chips, and the strip light on the ninth landing buzzed like a trapped wasp.

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The cutting had come from her late husband's allotment, a stub of wood that had sulked in a jam jar for a month. Gerald had always said roses wanted grit more than kindness, and she had spent forty years refusing to believe him. On the balcony she knelt on the cold concrete and pressed the stem into the tub, pinching the soil in small firm circles, the way he had taught her to stipple a sign for the shopfronts on Mill Road when his hands still held a steady pen.

Below, the estate kids were kicking a ball against the bin store. Across the way, a man in a vest was watering a fig in a bucket. Nobody looked up. She counted her own pencil dots on the back of an envelope, the way Gerald used to, until the number stopped meaning anything and the rose was simply there in the grey light, its petals folded over each other like a stack of ironed handkerchiefs.

When the lift finally groaned back into life on Friday, she was already halfway down, having decided she would walk. Let the lift have its own problems. Behind her, on the fourteenth floor, a single bud had split its green wrapping.