Black and grey realism roses entwined with swirling scrollwork running down the side of the torso, from the ribs towards the hip.

Black and grey roses with scrollwork on the side

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several shaded roses in various stages of bloom, with two buds, leaves and a long vine of flowing black scrollwork. The roses use soft grey shading and fine detail, while the scrolls are bold, uniform black lines. The design runs vertically down the side of the torso and is framed against plain skin, a grey top and dark trousers.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Bud Leaves Vine Scrollwork Swirl Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had kept the glasshouse at Thornleigh for thirty-one years and had never once let a rose go to seed on a wet morning. So when the new under-gardener, a boy from Scarborough called Tom Sallis, came to her at six with a bucket of black ink and a sketch of a climbing rose, she set down her secateurs and asked him what he thought he was doing.

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He said the roses on the south wall were dying of the cold and he meant to draw them a better wall. She laughed until she had to sit on the potting bench. Then she looked at his drawing, at the vine that curled out of its own loops like a fern unrolling, and at the three roses he had shaded in pencil, one open, one half shut, and one still a bud pinched tight at the top of the stem. She told him the bud was the only honest thing on the page.

They went out together with the ink and a fine brush. Tom ran the scrolls up the brickwork in long unbroken strokes, and where his hand wavered Ada made him start again until the line ran true from the flagstones to the eaves. The roses went on last, in greys he mixed from soot and milk. By noon the wall looked less like brick than a page someone had forgotten to finish.

The frost came that night, hard enough to split a water butt. In the morning the south wall was white, and every living rose on it had gone black and limp, except the three in ink, which stood as stiff and dark as they had been at noon. Ada stood in the yard with her hands in her apron for a long time. Then she sent for the master, because somebody would have to explain why the roses that had not been painted were dead and the ones that had were fine.

The master never asked for an explanation. He paid the boy a shilling more a week, and by spring the whole wall had been inked from the flagstones to the gutter. Ada still says the frost knew a good drawing when it saw one, and she will not let anyone scrub the bud off the top of the wall.