Tattoo artist working with a machine on an upper arm, with outlined roses shaded in blue in a traditional style.

Blue and outlined roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tattooist in white gloves works with a machine on a woman's upper arm. An outlined rose at the top of the arm is still unshaded, while a larger rose below it is filled with blue and teal shading, with leaf outlines around both. The photo is taken close up from a side angle, with the artist's hand and the tattoo in focus against a plain grey cabinet background.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Carol found the drawing before anyone else had found the bar. It was folded in the back of a fourth-year exercise book that had survived two house moves, and when she unfolded it on the sticky table at the Feathers she laughed so hard the landlady looked over. Two roses, one outlined in pencil and one filled in with blue biro because we had run out of the right colour and decided blue was close enough. We were fifteen. We had promised to get them done the day we turned eighteen, side by side, so nobody could say we had broken it.

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Nobody got them done. Carol went to Leeds, then to Dubai, and sent postcards with palm trees on them that our form tutor pinned to the staff noticeboard. I went to Swindon and stayed. The book went into a box, the box went under my mother's stairs, and the stairs were the one thing the flood did not reach.

The woman behind the bar, who had been in our year too, asked which of us had kept the drawing. Carol pointed at me. I said I had only kept it because nobody had asked for it back. That was true, but it was not the whole of it. I had kept it because the blue rose was the only thing in that book I had ever finished.

On the way out, Carol pressed the folded page into my palm and said she had booked a studio for Tuesday, a proper one with a machine that hummed like a fridge. She would go first, she always did. The pencil rose could stay pencil until I got there, she said, and I could shade it myself or let a stranger do it, but she was not waiting another twenty years for me to make up my mind.