Black and grey traditional-style roses with leaves and fine script above them, tattooed across a woman's shoulder.

Black and grey roses with script on shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two large roses with shaded petals and leaves sit across the shoulder, with a smaller bud at the top, and a cursive script runs above them toward the neck. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading inside the petals and dotted shading on the leaves. The image is a close phone photo in warm light, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaves Bud Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, The second frost has taken the last of the Albertines along the south wall, so I am writing this with my boots still on and the kettle going cold beside me. Your mother would have told you the roses were finished in October. She was right, as she was about most things that involved mud.

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The nursery is down to two hundred stock plants and the bank has stopped sending its cheerful letters. Mr Okafor from the garden centre in Ashford wants the old Dusky Maroons for his shop, and I told him he could have them over my dead body, which he found funny. But the two big bushes by the gate, the ones your grandfather grafted in 1961, have started putting out dark buds again. Shaded petals, as if someone had breathed on them. I have been sitting out there with a torch at night like a fool.

Here is the thing I meant to tell you. Under the bench in the potting shed I found his tin of Indian ink and a stack of drawings of roses, all done at the kitchen table, every petal shaded with dots because he said a plain line was too honest. On the back of the last one he had written, in that careful copperplate of his, my lovely, you are the only bloom I never had to feed. I laughed until I cried, then I didn't.

I am keeping the gate roses. Bring the girls at Easter and we will cut one for the church, and I will show you how to dot a leaf so it looks like it has been out in the rain. Love, Auntie Pam.