Woman with long wavy hair, seen from behind, reaching toward a graffiti wall with black and grey rose tattoos on her upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long wavy dark hair stands with her back to the camera and her right arm raised toward a white wall covered in graffiti lettering. Two large roses in black and grey shading cover her upper arm and extend down toward the forearm, with soft tonal shading across the petals and leaves. The warm, low-light photograph has a shallow focus on the arm and hair against the pale wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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They painted the long wall by the bins on Tuesday, the whole length of it, grey and then cream, and Mrs Okafor from fourteen came down in her slippers to shout at the men as if the paint had been her own idea. You'd have laughed. Everybody's tag went under in one afternoon. The names your cousins wrote in silver, the heart with the arrow through it, the crooked skull that Danny swore was a cat. Gone. I stood at the window with my tea and felt sorry for them, the way you feel sorry for a kite snagged on a roof.

But the thing I wanted to tell you about is the girl who came Thursday evening with a tin of black spray and a sketchbook full of roses. She didn't ask anybody. She just started at the bottom corner, sketching one big bloom in chalk, then another twisting out of it, leaves dark as wet tea leaves. By the time the light went she'd shaded the petals so they looked folded in tissue paper. Nobody could say what it was for. Mrs Okafor said it was a waste of good paint. Then she brought out a stool.

I went down the next morning. The roses were still there, grey and quiet against the cream, and somebody had left a jam jar at the foot of the wall with one real rose in it, bent over from the cold. I took it up to my flat and put it on the windowsill. It's still there, dried now, the petals gone the colour of old paper.

Write back soon. The wall is better than the graffiti ever was, and I think you should see it before the council decides to paint over that too.

Love, Nan

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