Black and grey engraved-style rose with two buds and leaves tattooed across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork rose and buds on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by two rosebuds and several serrated leaves. The linework is bold and outlined, with hatched and stippled shading that gives the petals depth. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the composition spreads across the arm with the rose as the focal point.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the lot of you, and mind the candle, because the snow has got under the door again and I'll not tell this twice. Eleven winters back the road over Thornmere Fold was shut for six weeks, and the only warm room for three miles was the kitchen of the Ploughshare, where Mrs Eliza Penhallow kept the bread oven going and a grudge against the climbing rose on her north wall.

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Her husband had planted it the spring before he died. It never bloomed. It sent out buds that the frost blackened before they could open, and every morning she went out with the shears and cut them back, and every morning there were more, tight as fists, their leaves cut sharp as tin.

Then a traveller came up the lane on foot, a thin man with a leather case of steel pens and a face like a clerk who had lost an argument with the weather. He was a copper-plate engraver, he said, bound for the market at Ashcombe, and the road was closed, so would she have him for a bed and a bowl. She gave him both, and in the morning she found him at the window with her household ledger open, drawing the rose on the north wall in ink so fine it looked like breath on glass. He had shaded the petals with hatching, dark where the folds went under and pale where the light caught the edge, and he had drawn the buds as though they were shut letters waiting to be read.

She looked at that drawing for a long time. Then she went out, and for the first time in eleven years she did not reach for the shears. The thaw came on the Thursday. The traveller went on towards Ashcombe with his case under his arm. In June the rose opened, all at once, the way the drawing had shown it, and she pressed the page between the leaves of the bread book, where it still is, if you care to see it.