Realistic black and grey roses with swirling vine linework running down the side of a person's back and ribs.

Black and grey roses and swirls down the side and back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three shaded roses with leaves, linked by large looping vine scrolls and smaller curls that run from the upper back down the side towards the waist. The roses use smooth grey shading and fine highlights, while the scrolls are drawn in bold black linework. The design fills the right side of the frame against pale skin, with a cream lace garment draped over the shoulder on the left.

Realism Botanical Back Ribs Rose Vine Swirl Leaf Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the pair of you, and mind the draught, for the last train's gone and the stationmaster's kettle is still warm. I'll tell you about Mrs Idris Pell, who kept the rose bed under the canopy at Harrowgate Halt for forty winters, and the cutting she was given by a man who never bought a ticket.

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He came off the milk train one March with a sack over his shoulder and a root wrapped in wet newspaper. Nobody saw where he went after. Mrs Pell took the root, set it against the cast iron where the ironwork curled like a fern gone to stone, and told the porters it would flower when the line was finally paid off. They laughed. The porters always laughed at her.

Well, the rose climbed. It threaded the scrollwork of the brackets, looped down the pillar to the bench, and by the second summer it had sent shoots up the signal post, dark green and thorned, with blossoms the colour of old pennies. Mrs Pell would stand in her apron with the secateurs and talk to it the way you'd talk to a difficult child.

When the council came to pull the canopy down in the autumn of the great frost, the gang found the iron too cold to lift. They left it. And in the spring, when the first train pulled in, there were three roses open on the signal post, shaded deep as a winter sky, and a brass ticket hanging from one stem with a name punched into it. Her name. Pell, one way. Nobody ever found out who had punched it, and the stationmaster said that was the end of the matter, and that is where I'll end it too, before the next train.