Black and grey traditional-style roses with hatched leaves covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Black and grey roses on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Several open roses and a closed bud are arranged in a cluster across the upper arm and shoulder, with dark leaves and stems filling the gaps. The roses use smooth grey shading and bold outlines, with leaves finished in fine hatched linework. The ink is entirely black and grey against the skin, and the design wraps around the arm in a vertical composition.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm asks me to write to you plainly, because the abbot has forbidden him to write anything at all since the business with the bees. So I am the pen this month, and you must forgive the ink, which is mostly soot and the last of the walnut gall.

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The roses are doing what roses do when no one is watching them. The old rose bed by the infirmary wall has gone wild over the winter, three bushes knotted into one, and Sister Cecily says the stems have climbed the cloister arch and are pressing through the lead of the north window. We cut back what we could on Tuesday. The buds we saved in a basket on the hearth, where they open slowly in the warm, and each morning there is one more, grey in the lamplight but blushing at the edges when the sun comes over the orchard wall.

I have drawn them for the lay brothers' register, as you asked, though my hand is worse than yours. Leaves with their little hatched veins, the closed bud standing apart from the open ones like a novice who has not yet decided. I could not make the shadows right on the largest bloom. It looks, Brother Anselm says, as though someone has cut it out of the light and left the shape behind. I told him that was rather the point of a rose at dusk, and he said I was being poetical, which is the worst thing a man can be in a scriptorium.

Write to me when the carrier comes through Ashcombe. Tell me whether the nursery in the town still has the striped damask. If it does, I will walk down on the feast day and bring back a cutting in wet sacking, and we will see whether the bed can take one more.