Colour botanical sleeve tattoo of blue and purple roses with green leaves and vines across a shoulder and upper arm.

Blue and purple roses across shoulder and arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of roses wraps from the shoulder down the upper arm, with a bright blue rose at the top and deep purple roses lower down. Green leaves and thin curling vines link the flowers, with soft shading and highlights on the petals. The arm is shown from the side against a dark background, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Vine Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Across the dry hills of Maren, where the wind had stripped the topsoil to grey, a gardener named Ysolde Brand kept the last greenhouse on the terrace. Her roses came up the colour of old bruises, because the ground had gone sour, and nobody in the valley expected anything else from them.

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One spring a stranger came up the switchback road carrying a seed case wrapped in oilcloth. He said it had come from the deep orchards across the sea, where the blue roses grew in the rain. He wanted nothing for it except a bed and a promise that she would not sell the first bloom. She asked why he trusted her with it. He said a vine remembers whoever tends it, and he was gone before dawn.

She planted it at the top of the terrace where the sun came first. The canes were thin as wire and wound around anything they could reach, so she trained them down the greenhouse wall, over the gate, and along the old stone well, and every new thorn drew a fine green line behind it. The first bloom opened the week the frost left the hills, and its petals were blue as deep water under a lamp. The lower canes, still rooted in the sour ground, bloomed purple, and she let them.

When the valley children came to see it, they asked whether the blue would stay. Ysolde cut one flower, pressed it between the pages of her grandmother's recipe book, and told them the vine would go wherever its roots could find water, and the colour would follow. Then she went back to the well, where the vine had already found the cold stone and begun to climb it.