Black and grey realism tattoo of roses and a butterfly running up a forearm, with small script on the wrist.

Black and grey roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a cluster of realistic roses in black and grey shading, with a butterfly near the upper forearm and leaves between the blooms. Fine shading gives the petals depth and soft tonal gradients, and small script sits on the inner wrist. The arm rests across a pair of ripped light blue jeans in a car interior, with the tattoo filling the lower half of the frame.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Butterfly Leaves Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings arrived at Greave Lane Nurseries in a biscuit tin, wrapped in newspaper gone soft with damp. Ada Pryce had driven them up from the fens with the tin wedged against the dashboard, because her father had always said a rose would forgive you almost anything except being rushed.

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He had kept the old varieties in a row against the south wall, roses that had dropped out of catalogues before she was born. Nobody bought them any more. The men from the garden centres wanted scarlet and yellow, things that sold in plastic pots beside the petrol pumps. Ada had spent three winters trying to sell the grey ones, the blooms that looked as if someone had shaded their petals with a soft pencil, and had sold exactly one.

In March a buyer rang from London and said he would take the lot if she could make him a single rose like the one in his grandmother's photograph. She had no photograph, only the wall. She went out with the secateurs and found a small brown butterfly resting on the top bud of the oldest bush, wings folded as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. She did not cut that bush. She took a shoot from the lowest end, the one with leaves tucked between the blooms, and set it in a jar on the sill.

When the root came through she wrapped it in the same newspaper, pressed the lid on the tin, and drove it to the churchyard at the end of the lane. She planted it beside her father's stone, where the wall would have been if he had built one, and the butterfly, she told herself, had gone on to wherever butterflies went in April.