Black and grey rose tattoo on the forearm of a woman taking a mirror selfie in a black bralette and grey joggers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman takes a mirror selfie in a black bralette and grey drawstring trousers, with her face hidden behind a phone. A black and grey rose tattoo is visible on her forearm, shown in shaded petals and darker leaves. The plain white door and pale wall form a neutral background, and the tattoo sits at the left edge of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had been on Ward 7B for nine hours when Mr Pell asked for a rose. It was gone two in the morning and the only flowers in the building were in the foyer, behind the locked doors of the shop, so she told him she would see what she could do. He was eighty-one, had a catheter he hated and a daughter in Leeds who rang at seven on the dot, and he did not look like a man who asked for things.

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The biro was in her top pocket, the back of a meal menu was in the drawer at the nurses' station, and the corridor lights had been dimmed to the amber they used after midnight. She sat on the edge of the sluice-room stool and drew the rose the way her gran used to draw them on tea towels: a tight bud at the centre, petals curling outward like pages, the stem running down into a few jagged leaves. Biro did not do colour, so she went over the shadows again and again, pressing harder on the inner curls until they went dark and glossy, and left the outer petals pale where the light would fall.

When she brought it back, he held it at arm's length and squinted. "Too dark at the heart," he said. "My wife never let me shade like that. She said it looked like someone had been sulking in it."

Ruth laughed, which was not allowed at that hour, and he almost smiled. He asked her to leave it where he could see it, so she tucked it into the frame of the window, between the blind and the glass, where the car park lights came through grey.

At six, when the day staff came on, the rose was still there and his breathing had gone slow and even. Ruth stood a moment in the doorway, then went to write up her notes. Nobody had asked her about the drawing, and she did not mention it either.