Black and grey rose tattoo with a long stem on a person's upper back, shaded in soft, watercolour-like washes.

Black and grey rose on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A rose sits centrally on the upper back, with its bloom at the top and a long, tapering stem running down the spine. The rose is built from soft grey shading and dark accents, with loose, feathered edges and a few fine splatter-like marks along the stem. The composition is centred on the subject, with the person's shoulders and hair visible and the background out of focus.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Stem Petal Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the gravel, because this is the one about Maud Ashgrove and the rose that would not take the colour of anything. Her father kept the walled garden at Hollin Park, and every spring he grafted the same red rose onto the same tired stock, and every spring the bloom came up the colour of a wet slate roof. Nobody thought much of it. A rose is a rose, the squire said, and paid him in mutton.

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Maud was the one who noticed the ink. The clerk from the town came up each Michaelmas to ledger the estate, and his pen leaked across the blotter the way cheap pens do. The old gardener swept the spill from the potting bench into a jar, and the jar sat by the back door until the frost, and then it was gone. Maud found the cutting bent over the stone trough, its stem black as a crow's leg and its bud still shut tight.

She planted it where the morning light was slow to come, at the foot of the wall, and she talked to it the way you talk to a dog that bites. Through the wet winter nothing happened. Then in June the bud opened all at once, grey at the edges and darkest at its heart, and one drop of old ink hung from the lowest leaf like a tear that had forgotten to fall.

The squire came to see it and went quiet. He said nothing about slate or mutton that year. Some say the rose still climbs that wall, and some say the clerk went back to London with his pens and his blotter and never once asked where the ink went. Either way, if you walk past Hollin Park in the rain, you will see the stem leaning out over the road, thin and dark, with the bloom turned towards the house.