Black and grey realistic roses with fine vines and leaves running from the upper arm down the forearm of a person in a white vest top.

Black and grey roses on an upper arm and forearm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two large shaded roses sit on the upper arm and continue with trailing vines and leaves down the forearm. The tattoo uses soft grey shading and fine dark linework, with the highlights left as bare skin. The image is a phone screenshot of a search result, with the person's shoulder and arm filling the frame against a wooden floor and white top.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Rose Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hedge along the lane below Alder Cross has grown over the stile again, and you come up through the wet bracken with the billhook over your shoulder, because your father's knees will not take the slope anymore and somebody has to be the one who goes into the wood. Nobody in the village ever cuts the roses back properly. They say you leave the briars alone past the first gate, or the wood keeps what it takes.

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The roses are older than the wall. Their heads are the size of cabbages, blown open and gone the colour of old pennies at the edges, and where the low sun cannot reach them they look as though they have been drawn in soot. You take the first vine at the root. It is thick as a wrist and it fights, then gives, and a long trailing stem slides down the bank toward your boot with leaves that are sharp at the teeth. Under the bark there is a green so pale it almost looks white, the colour of the inside of a shell.

By dusk you have cleared four yards and found, pressed into the bank beneath the largest bloom, a tin box with a rusted hinge. Inside is a folded map of the wood, drawn in pencil, every gate marked with a small rose. Someone has written on the back: keep the light on the petals and leave the shadows where they fall. Your hands are scratched to ribbons and you laugh out loud at a sentence so plainly meant for gardeners.

You walk back down with the billhook quiet and the map in your coat. At the stile the lane lamp is lit, and your father is waiting with the dog, looking up at the cut stems you have stacked along the wall. He does not ask what you found. You tell him the roses are still there, and that someone has been keeping the edges clean for a long time.