Black and grey shaded roses and a dark geometric shape tattooed on a forearm, with the person standing in a white room wearing a pale floral shirt and jeans.

Black and grey roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing figure is cropped from the shoulders to the feet, with one forearm raised and showing a tattoo of shaded roses and a dark angular geometric element near the wrist. The ink appears to be black and grey with soft shading on the petals and bold solid areas. The background is a bright white room with a wall-mounted TV, a small potted plant and a wooden shelf, and the framing keeps the tattoo as a secondary detail.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had been counting the bottles in the cellar since the lane closed, because counting was easier than listening to the wind worry at the shutters. The inn at Scarth Fell had nine rooms, two guests and a fire that would not last the week at the rate Pim fed it. Behind the bar, the window glass had grown a crust of frost so thick it looked like the wrong side of a pane.

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On the third morning she found the roses. Someone had breathed on the glass in the night, or the cold had simply decided to draw: black stems, black heads, petals shaded with a grey that seemed to sit beneath the ice rather than on it. Angular lines ran off the stems as though a compass had been dragged through the frost. Pim said it was damp. The surveyor in room four, a man from Carlisle with a dry way of speaking, said it looked like a benchmark drawn by someone who had never measured anything, then looked embarrassed for saying it.

That night Marta took a cloth and a bucket of warm water to the glass, meaning to wipe the roses away. She stopped with the cloth an inch from the pane. The frost had moved. Where the roses had been, a thread of red rowan had pushed through from outside and lay flat against the glass, as if it wanted in. She had never told anyone that her mother's name was Rosa, and she had never once seen her mother draw anything.

By Thursday the road was open and the surveyor had gone. The roses were gone too, melted into a wet grey stain on the sill. Marta went to the window anyway and found, cut into the wood beneath the sash, the same sharp angle, neat as a ruler line, with a date from thirty years back. She traced it with her thumb, then went to put the kettle on.