Black and grey shaded rose tattoo on a woman's shoulder, with petals reaching toward the collarbone.

Black and grey rose on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose with layered petals is tattooed across the top of the shoulder and upper chest. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading that gives the petals depth and volume. The photograph is cropped to the shoulder and chest, with a beige knitted top and a rhinestone skull design on the sweater, which is not a tattoo.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came down on the Thursday before the Ashby show, and by Friday dawn Agnes Marsh had already wrapped her rose bush in two sheets of hessian and an old candlewick bedspread. She knelt in the wet grass with a torch in her teeth, tying string around the canes, while the kitchen light across the lane went on and off as her husband Ray searched for his reading glasses.

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The bush was called Mrs Sinclair, a deep cabbage-coloured rose that Agnes had grown from a cutting pinched off her mother's hedge in Stockport. Its outer petals were broad and curled back like the lips of old letters, and the inner ones folded tight, shading from near-black at the heart to ash grey where the light caught them. Desmond Pryce, who had won the roses class for eleven years running with a flower Agnes privately thought looked like a boiled sweet, had been asking after its health all week.

On Saturday the judge, a retired vicar in a green cardigan, lifted each bloom under the marquee lights and turned it slowly, as if he were reading a page. He stopped at Agnes's entry for a long time. Frost had blackened two of the outer petals, and he touched the crumpled edge with one finger. "Look at the shadows," he said. "Someone's drawn these, not grown them."

The rosette went to Agnes. Desmond shook her hand without quite meeting her eye, then left a single pale stem in a jam jar on her trestle table, the same rose, cut from the far side of the lane where the frost had not reached. Agnes pinned the blue ribbon to her coat and carried the jar home in both hands.