Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, a poppy-style flower and leaves across the inner upper arm.

Black and grey roses and flowers on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of roses, an open five-petalled flower and several leaves arranged in a loose spray across the inner upper arm. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with soft grey shading and dark accents, giving them depth. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the centre of the arm against a plain pale wall.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Rose Flower Poppy Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth wanted no colour at her wedding, which left me, a florist with forty years of reds and yellows under my nails, sitting at the kitchen table with a tin of graphite pencils and a bag of wilting roses from the market. Her father had drawn in grey all his life. He sketched gardens on the backs of invoices and once told me that shadow was where a flower kept its secrets. Ruth found his old sketchbook in a box marked TAXES and asked me to make his garden walk down the aisle.

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I started with the poppy, because it opens fast and fades faster, and you have to decide quickly what the petals are doing. Then the roses, which I drew three times before I got one that looked as if it had been left in the sun a little too long. He never drew them perfect. He pressed the darks in at the edges and let the middle go soft, the way light falls off a curved thing. My hands kept wanting to correct him, and I kept not letting them.

On the day, the drawings hung in the hall on garden twine, twenty-three of them, pegged with wooden clothes pegs. Guests wandered between them with their glasses, murmuring about the leaves. Ruth's uncle, who had argued for a week about the cost of the cake, stood in front of the largest rose for a long time and said nothing at all.

When the speeches were done, I found him still there, his thumb resting on the corner of the paper. 'He'd have hated this,' he said. 'Too neat.' Then he took a pencil from my apron pocket, leaned in, and smudged the shadow under one petal with the side of his thumb. 'There,' he said. 'Now it's his.'