Black and grey realism tattoo of three open roses and a rosebud with leaves, on the side of a torso above the waistband of jeans.

Black and grey roses on the side of the torso

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three open roses and a closed rosebud, with dark serrated leaves and thin stems arranged in a diagonal cluster. The petals are built up with soft grey shading and fine highlights, giving them volume and a realistic look. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the skin from the upper flank down towards the waistband of the jeans.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Rosebud Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abbott counted the cuttings twice before she trusted them. Four stems, wrapped in wet newspaper, had come up on the late train from Lowestoft with a label in her brother's square capitals: ROSA MUNDI, DO NOT LET THEM DRY. She laid them on the kitchen table beside the bread knife and the tea caddy, and the house went quiet around her the way it always did before the guests came down for breakfast.

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The garden behind Marine Terrace had been her mother's, and her mother's before that, a long strip of clay running down to the sea wall. Nothing had grown there since the gale of 1953 except brambles and one rosebush the salt had not managed to kill. That evening Mrs Abbott knelt in the mud with a trowel and a jar of water and tried to remember which way the buds had leaned.

Three of the cuttings took. The fourth she set in a tumbler on the windowsill, because a rosebud is always the last to open and she had learned that patience cost less than replanting. By August the top bloom had unclenched itself like a fist letting go of coins, and the one below had loosened into a pale cup that caught the afternoon. Lodgers stopped on the path to admire them. Nobody asked where the stems had come from.

In September the last of the summer guests packed their cases and left by the early bus. Mrs Abbott went up to strip their beds and found the tumbler on the sill empty, its bud gone soft and crimson at the edges. She cut the open rose from the garden and set it in the room where the bud had been, then closed the door on the smell of salt and wet newspaper.