Black and grey rose tattoo with a stem and leaves on the back of a hand, against a dark background, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black rose tattoo on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A single rose with a closed bloom, stem and two leaves is tattooed on the back of a hand, running down towards the knuckle of the index finger. The rose head is outlined with shaded petals, while the stem and leaves are filled with solid black ink. The image is in black and grey against a plain black background, which isolates the tattoo and the hand.

Botanical Blackwork Hand Rose Stem Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had come early to Hollin Edge, and Mrs Pargeter's roses were the first to know it. Joan sent the boy up the lane with a basket of cuttings for the vicar's wife, though everyone in the village knew the vicar's wife had no garden left to plant them in. The cuttings were black-stemmed, taken from the one bush that grew against the wall of the old charcoal burner's cottage, where the forest began.

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Nobody picked from that bush. Its bloom had stayed shut since midsummer, a tight dark fist of petals with the outer edges turned back like a collar against the cold. Joan's husband had said it would open when the woods stopped listening. He said a great many things after the second bottle, and she had stopped answering him years ago.

That night the wind came down off the trees, and the boy came running back with his cap in his hands. "It's open," he said. Joan went up in her husband's boots. The bloom had unfolded in the dark, pale at the heart and edged with something like ash. She knelt in the wet grass and cut the stem with the shears her mother had used, low, just beneath the last leaf.

Halfway down the lane she understood what the burner had meant when he said the forest only ever gave one rose at a time. She set the flower on the vicar's gatepost, where anyone could see it in the morning, and walked home without looking back at the trees. By dawn the gatepost was bare, and the bush against the cottage wall had three new buds, every one of them shut tight.