Black and grey traditional-style rose with two smaller flowers and leaves on the stomach, with a partly visible tattoo on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black rose with flanking flowers on the stomach

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large black rose with shaded petals and leaves sits at the centre, flanked by two smaller flowers with solid black centres and simple outlines. The linework is bold and the shading uses solid black with grey highlights. The image is black and grey, with a torso in a white lace bra and skirt, and a partly visible tattoo of moon phases and a floral design on the forearm at the left edge.

Traditional Botanical Other Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Moon phase Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the hedge at Cole's Row by the time I came out with the secateurs, and the dark roses along the wall looked scorched rather than dead. Mum said to leave them alone. Mr Pardoe from the signwriting shop on Mill Lane had been paying a shilling a bloom for anything deep enough to press, and he was the only man in Haddon Vale who never asked what it was for.

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On Saturdays he worked in the back room behind the blinds, inking the sailors who came up from the depot with anchors and hearts. He mixed his black from lamp soot and gum arabic, and he let me hold the lamp while he shaded one petal at a time with a tremor in his wrist that he swore came from the war and not the drink. Ivy and Nell had gone to Leeds to marry, so he drew them as two small daisies, one either side, with their middles left solid so they would hold the eye.

The needle hummed like a fly against a window. He told me a rose would outlast any frost if you kept its stem in water and its name in your mouth. I didn't believe him, not then. When Mum came to fetch me she stood in the doorway a long while, looking at the sheet of tracing paper pinned to the wall, and then she took the lamp out of my hands and said the daisies had to sit lower, nearer the heart, or they would look like they were running away.