Black and grey floral tattoo of roses and leaves across a woman's shoulder and upper arm, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wears a dark floral dress with thin straps, and a large floral tattoo covers her shoulder and upper arm. The design features rose heads, leaves and trailing stems drawn with fine, detailed linework and soft grey shading. The left panel shows the tattoo from the side and the right panel from the front, both in a soft, warm-toned indoor setting.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Leaves Vine Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The roses came back over the wall in June, just as you said they would when we pulled the ivy off the keep. Nobody planted them. The old countess's gardeners have been dead forty years, but the briars kept on, climbing the broken stones in long trailing stems that reach for the arrow slits as if they mean to look out.

I went up yesterday with the shears and the book of Latin names Mother kept. The heads are the size of a child's fist, grey-pink in the shade and black at the edges where the rain has got in. Some of the petals have names scratched on their inner curls if you look close enough, though the ink is mostly rumour now. I copied three into the back of the book. Ysolde. Marguerite. Hob.

The steward's boy says the lady of the house walked into the moat rather than marry the Brenning lord, and that her roses were the only thing she asked to keep. I don't believe a word of it. Roses do not care who they belong to. They only want light and a wall to climb.

Still, I cut the last bloom from the south stair and put it in my coat. It is in the parlour window now, shedding onto the flagstones one petal at a time. Every morning there is one fewer, and every morning the stems have gone another foot up the stone toward the sky.

Yours, Ada