Black and grey realistic roses tattooed across the back of a hand, with a steel wristwatch on the wrist in a monochrome photo.

Black and grey roses across the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two or three large roses with layered petals and soft shading fill the back of the hand, with a few smaller leaves and petals along the top edge. The linework is fine and dark, and the greys are blended to give the petals depth and volume. A silver chronograph watch sits on the wrist to the left, and the black and white photograph is taken at a close angle.

Realism Botanical Hand Rose Petal Leaves Watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the gravy. You want to hear about Mrs Ada Pruett's roses? Then listen, because I'll tell it once and the kettle won't wait. The Marine Terrace guesthouse in Cleethorpes had a yard out the back, and in that yard Ada grew forty bushes, every one of them black in the dark, because the sea fog never lifted before eleven and the roses only showed their true colour to the people who knew where to look.

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Her husband Walter was a ships' chandler who timed every tide on a steel watch with a black bezel, and he had a habit of checking it whenever Ada cut a bloom. Each morning she took one rose from the middle bush, the one with petals layered like folded letters, and set it in the hall beside his watch. He wound the watch, she cut the rose, and the house ran on those two small sounds for thirty years. Then one winter the watch stopped at twenty past six, and Walter went out in a northerly and didn't come back.

Ada kept the watch on the hall table and never had it mended. In spring the roses opened all at once, three of them overblown and heavy as fists, and she would not cut them. She let them drop their petals onto the flags, and the guests came for the smell and stayed for the quiet. Ask me what it means and I'll pour you another cup and say nothing more. But if you go into that hall today, you'll find the watch still on the table, and the hands still at twenty past six, and a single petal beside it, pressed flat as a coin.