Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses, leaves and small blossoms across the inner forearm, shaded with fine hatching.

Black and grey roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two full roses with layered petals sit side by side, flanked by leaves and a cluster of small five-petalled flowers with buds. The design is outlined in crisp black linework and filled with fine hatching and stippled shading that gives the petals depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a forearm against a white background, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Rose Leaves Flower Blossom Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two roses at Sixteen Mile Well had been planted by a widow who wanted something that would not die, and for eleven summers they did not. Travellers stopped in their shade and hooked their tin cups on the thorns while the water went down in the barrels. Nobody on the road thought the roses were pretty. They thought them stubborn, the way the widow was stubborn, and she kept them alive with dishwater and spite.

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One evening a boy came up the road on foot, leading a thin goat with a letter stitched inside his collar. The letter was for the widow's brother, who had gone west with the railroad nine years back and never written. The boy could not read it aloud, so he asked the widow where a man might be found. She told him to sit down and wait for the wind to change. He sat. The goat ate a leaf from the lower stem and she did not stop it.

When the wind turned that night it brought a smell of wet ground from the north, and before dawn a man rode in on a grey mule. He stopped at the wall, saw the tin cups hanging from the thorns, and lifted one down. It was full of rain. He had left it there himself, years ago, on his way out, with his name scratched into the rim. He drank the water and did not say a word.

Both roses opened the next morning, full and heavy, and the goat was not sorry for the leaves it had eaten.