Traditional style tattoo of a shaded black rose with green leaves and a bud on the forearm, with the word soon in script below and partial designs beside it.

Black rose with script on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large black rose with grey shading, outlined in black, sits at the centre of the image with a rosebud and green-shaded leaves on a long stem. Below it, the word soon is written in black script, and partial designs of a bird-like head and a dark creature with red and yellow accents appear around the lower edge. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale background, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem Script Word Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pat,

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I've been meaning to write since the reunion, but the hall smelled so much of floor polish that I came home and sat in the car until the windows fogged. You were right that Mr Hollis still wears the same brown cardigan. He asked after you twice and I told him you'd gone to Cornwall to be a lighthouse keeper, which he seemed to believe.

Something else I should tell you. Do you remember the black rose Dennis Crowe drew on the back of your geography book in the fourth form? He never got it right, the petals looked like a clenched fist. Well, I saw it again at the bar, on the arm of a lad who runs the cricket club now. A proper one, done by someone who knew what they were about, with grey shading laid on soft as breath on a window, a bud at the side and a stem that curled down out of sight. Underneath it was one word in curly black script. Soon.

I asked him what it meant and he laughed and said it was something his nan used to say whenever anybody asked when the kettle would be on. Then I thought of us at sixteen, sitting on the wall behind the chip shop, promising we'd leave Tamworth together by the summer. Soon, we said. Every week for two years, soon.

Write back and tell me you're still meaning to come up. The rose is still there if you want to see it, and Hollis says the hall is booked again in June.

Love, Maureen