Black and grey botanical tattoo of a cluster of roses with leaves on the outer forearm near the wrist, beside a hand resting on a hip.

Black rose cluster on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two open roses and several leaves is tattooed on the outer forearm, running up from the wrist. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, giving the flowers a detailed, engraved look. The tattoo is done entirely in black and grey ink against plain light skin, and a gold filigree ring is worn on the middle finger of the hand in the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Botanical Ring Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate had come back from the printers with the second rose gone soft, its petals bled into the shading like butter left on a windowsill, and Mrs Ogden wanted the seed catalogue in the post by Friday. Joan Pyle sat at the bench above the chemist's in Hallam Market with a loupe screwed into one eye and a burnisher in her fist, and she did not look up when the bell over the door went.

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It was Tom from the ironmonger's, sent by his mother with a parcel of ring blanks and a message that the church flower guild had a notion about brass. Joan ignored the brass. She carried the plate to the window and tilted it toward the light, counting the hatched lines under the lens: forty to the width of a thumbnail, each one cut by hand the winter her husband went to sea and did not come back. The roses had been her father's design, copied from a Dutch print nobody in Hallam had ever seen the original of.

She worked until the chapel clock struck six. Tom waited, turning a gold filigree ring over in his palm, the one his mother had left on the counter to be cleaned. Joan took it, held it up against the plate, and saw the two roses line up through its cutwork like a pair of faces at a gate. "Leave it with me," she said. When she gave it back on Friday she had run a fine black line through every open lace of the metal, and the petals on the plate had firmed again, sharp as the morning her father cut them.