Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, peonies and trailing vines across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Black and grey roses across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's shoulder and upper arm carry a tattoo of roses, peony-like blooms, leaves and thin trailing vines. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading in the petals and leaves. The design wraps from the top of the shoulder down the outer upper arm, with the cropped frame showing the neck and collarbone area beside it.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Peony Flower Leaves Vine Bud

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, the same as it was when your grandfather tripped over it carrying the cider in. Sit where the light comes through the Bramley boughs. No, not there, that's the wasp end.

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The roses came over the wall the year the last of the old apple men died. Nobody planted them. Dorothy Crane swore a bird brought the cutting in its gullet, and Dorothy never lied except about her age. By September the briar had climbed the orchard wall and gone up into the trees, and it bloomed the way peonies bloom, heavy and sulking, too full for their own stems. The men from the council wanted it cut back. They came with shears and went home with scratched hands and nothing to say.

Then Walter Hesketh, who had the far field and a bad temper, sat under the trunk with a flask and watched the buds. He said the thing about roses was that they only open properly when somebody leaves them alone long enough. Every morning he took a knife to a single vine and counted the thorns. Forty-one, the first week. Thirty-eight by the next. Nobody asked him why. He had never been a man for explanations.

On the last evening of August the blooms let go all at once, and the whole orchard smelt like wet paper and sugar. Walter was found in the grass with his hat over his face and a bud in his fist, smiling at nothing. The council man said it was his heart. Dorothy said it was the roses, and that the vines had only taken back what was owed. I still have the cutting. Hold out your hand.