Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose, buds, leaves and a small blossom on the outer thigh.

Black and grey rose cluster on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral cluster centres on a full-blown rose, with rosebuds, a small open blossom and several leaves spreading across the thigh. The linework is fine and the leaves and petals are built up with soft shading and stippled texture, giving depth without any colour. The tattoo fills the left of the frame, with a hand holding dark fabric at the right and a blurred pale wall behind.

Botanical Thigh Rose Flower Blossom Rosebud Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose on the Skerry came up from a cutting that had crossed three sounds in a fishing boat's wet hold, wrapped in a sack that smelled of herring. Now you are the one who must keep it alive, because old Mairi Tulloch has gone to live with her son in Aberdeen and left you the key to the walled garden and a list written in pencil. Feed the bed with seaweed every spring. Keep the wind off the buds. Do not, under any circumstances, cut the one that has opened by itself.

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The garden is walled against the gales that come off the water in February, and inside it the air is almost warm. Bees find it before anyone else does. On the third morning you find a small open blossom beside the big bloom, flat as a coin, and a cluster of hard green buds still shut tight on their stems, as if they have not yet decided the island is worth the trouble. You sit on an upturned creel with your tea going cold and count the leaves, which are dark and veined and scalloped at the edges, and you find you cannot stop counting.

The list said nothing about the letters. There is a biscuit tin under the potting bench, and inside it are forty years of postcards from the mainland, all addressed to the garden in a hand that grows shakier with each one. Every card ends with the same line: tell the rose I am still coming back. You read them in order by the light from the door. The last one is dated the week before she left, and the postmark is smudged where someone at the sorting office pressed too hard.

In June the big rose opens fully, heavy and rumpled, its petals shading from pale at the heart to nearly black at the rim where the sun never quite reaches. You break the list's rule and cut one stem after all. You carry it down to the harbour and wait by the rail until the ferry pulls away, then you hold the stem out over the water and let the wind take the petals one by one, the way Mairi would have wanted you to tell her.