Black and grey dotwork rose with a stem and leaves tattooed on the inner forearm of a person with pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rose in full bloom with a long stem and three leaves is tattooed on the forearm. The petals are built from fine stippled dots and tonal shading, which gives the flower soft volume and depth. The rose fills the centre of the frame against a plain, pale background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the rose came up from the allotment in a jam jar this morning, roots wrapped in a wet sack, and I have stood it on the kitchen windowsill where the pit dust cannot reach it. Mam says that is a waste of a good sill. Your father would have laughed at the pair of us. He was the one who dotted the chapel gate with a nail when we were girls, pricking out every petal until the wood looked like frost, and he said anything could be made from dots if you had the patience and a bad light.

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The bloom is Eddie Carr's doing. He grew it behind the lamp room for thirty summers and never once cut a flower for himself, only for the widows on Front Street. Last week the roof came down in the old drift and they brought him up at dusk, grey as the slag heap, and his wife asked me to fetch something green for the front room. Everything else in the gardens had gone over. This one was still opening, one petal at a time, as if it had not heard the news.

So I took the kitchen scissors and cut it, and I sat with it on the table until the light went, counting the leaves. Three on the stem, the same number you drew on the back of my school exercise book the summer before you went south. I think about that more than I should. Mrs Carr took the flower from me at the door without a word and set it in a jug on the piano, and the lamp caught every dark dot Eddie ever pressed into those petals.

On Thursday I'll take one from the jug for the grave. Write soon, and tell me whether the sea air has got into your handwriting yet. Your loving sister, Annie.