Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, wild rose blooms and leaves covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Black and grey roses and wild roses on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral composition of two full roses, several open single-petalled wild rose blooms, buds, leaves and fine sprigs, arranged in a cluster that runs from the shoulder down the upper arm. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading across the petals and leaves that gives them volume. The image is in black and grey only, photographed close up against a blurred background with the subject's face out of frame.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Shoulder Rose Flower Bud Leaf Sprig Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Ardent Mary had been three weeks out of Gravesend when the wet got into my cases, and I spent the night on my knees in the tween deck with a lamp and a pot of wax, sealing the cut ends of my roses one by one. Forty-one cuttings I had carried from Mr Lyle's walled garden at Rye. Thirty-eight were full roses, the pale heavy sort his grandmother had planted, and the other three were dog roses from the hedge by the churchyard, five petals each and no more pink than a saucer's worth.

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Captain Oakes came down at dawn to see what the noise was. He stood with his hat in his hand and looked at the cases a long while. 'Those'll not survive the Line,' he said. 'Nothing that opens like that does.' I told him the wild ones would. They had grown up on a bank of chalk where nothing else would take root, and they had the stubbornness of things that were never asked to be pretty.

By the Cape the full roses had gone brown at their edges and I had given up on them. The dog roses sat in damp moss on the galley shelf, where the cook let me keep them for the warmth, and one morning in the latitudes where the sea lay flat as lead, a bud split open on the middle one with nobody watching. I carried it up to the rail and held it out over the water, five pink petals and a yellow heart full of small hard stamens, and the wind took it before I could decide anything.

I still have the other two. They are planted in a tub outside a rented house in Adelaide, and every October I cut one back and tell whoever is near that wild stock will carry a good rose if you are patient enough to graft it. Oakes never believed me. He said the sea would have had them. I said the sea had only ever taken what I offered it.