Black and grey botanical rose tattoo covering the shoulder, upper arm and upper chest of a woman in a red floral dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses across shoulder and chest

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's shoulder, upper arm and upper chest carry a cluster of roses in black ink with fine shading and detailed petals, leaves and thin vines. The engraved-looking linework and grey tonal shading give the roses a vintage botanical illustration feel. The tattoo flows from the shoulder onto the chest and down the upper arm, with the dark floral dress contrasting against the pale skin.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Chest Rose Leaves Bud Vine Flower Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Penhallow had cut forty-one roses into copper before Mrs Gedge sent the drawing back with a single word scrawled across the margin: wrong. The Dorset nursery wanted its plate for the autumn catalogue, a damask called Lady of the Vale, and he had given them a rose so exact that a botanist could count its stamens. Still wrong. He carried the plate home on the omnibus, wrapped in a tea towel, and set it on the kitchen table beside the lamp.

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His granddaughter Nell, nine and sticky with marmalade, studied the copper and announced that the roses were sulking. "They're all facing the same way," she said. "Roses don't face one way. They lean towards whatever's warm." He told her she was talking nonsense, but the light was going and the plate was no use to anybody, so he took the lamp out to the yard, where the old climber clung to the wall, and watched how each bloom tipped towards the glow.

Next morning he engraved again, holding the burin loosely, letting the lines run into shadow and curl where the petals folded back on themselves. The vine wandered off the page and over the edge of the plate, as if it had somewhere else to be. Mrs Gedge sent a telegram: ACCEPTED STOP WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VINE. He did not reply.

Nell kept the first proof pinned above her bed for years afterwards, the stiff, correct roses standing in a row like coins, but the one she loved best was the crooked one nobody had asked for, its buds reaching off the paper towards whatever light was left in the room.