Black and grey rose tattoo on a woman's shoulder, with a small script tattoo on her upper chest near the collarbone.

Black and grey roses on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper body shows a cluster of roses tattooed over the shoulder and upper arm, drawn in dark outlines with grey shading. A small script tattoo sits on the upper chest towards the left of the frame, but its wording is too small and soft to read clearly. The black lace top, a coffee cup in the foreground and a warm, low-contrast background sit around the skin.

Botanical Shoulder Chest Rose Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brannoc the goatherd came up the track with his cap in one fist and blood running from his wrist, because the briars had closed over the postern gate again and he had tried to cut them back with his knife. Maud Harrow, who kept the ruin of Corran Keep and had done so since her mother died, only nodded and went to fetch her shears. She had known the roses since she was a girl, when they were pale things pushing up between the chapel flagstones, and she had never once been stung by one that she had not first asked.

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The old people said Lord Aylmer had started the trouble. He wanted the grey stone of the keep for a new house in the valley, so he sent his men to dig out every root in a single hard autumn and carried the blocks down on carts. The following spring the roses came back black at the edges, the way a bruise comes up, and they climbed the wall he had left standing in heavy clusters, each petal folded over the next like cloth on a line. Men who went near them with axes found their hands shook too much to swing. Aylmer rode down to his new house one evening and was never seen on the hill again.

Brannoc sat on the step and held his wrist while Maud worked. He asked her why she kept them when they took a finger every spring. She said the roses held the wall up, because where the root had been torn out the mortar had gone to sand, and nothing else in the valley would grow on that ground anyway. She cut one bloom, dark as a bruise at the rim and grey in its shadows, and pressed the stem into his good hand.

The thorns did not touch his skin. "Take that down the hill," she said, "and tell them the gate is open."