Colour traditional tattoo of blue and purple roses with green leaves and a rosebud, running down a forearm.

Blue and purple roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm is covered with a cluster of roses, including a blue rose in the centre, two purple roses and a rosebud at the top with green leaves. The outlines are bold and black, with smooth shading and highlights that give the petals volume. Colour ink dominates, with greens for the foliage and blues and purples for the flowers against pale skin.

Traditional Forearm Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told for thirty years that a blue rose cannot be grown, and you have spent most of them proving the men who said it wrong with nothing but secateurs and a stubborn streak. Mr Halloran's nursery sits at the end of Tanner Lane in Corran Bridge, where the glasshouses steam every morning in February and the soil smells of wet slate. He let you have the cuttings the year the co-operative closed, on the understanding that you would not bring him another failure in a jam jar.

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The first blue came in June, pale as skimmed milk, and you carried it down the High Street in both hands like a lit candle. Mrs Pryce from the chemist saw it and laughed until she had to sit on the bench outside the bank. Purple came easier, a bruised colour from crosses you made at the back bench under a magnifying glass, with a tin of Brasso beside you for the tools. Blue you had to coax, dosing the beds with alum and staying up after dark to watch the petals open when nobody else was looking.

Halloran died in September. The will left you the glasshouses, a ledger of crosses in his square hand, and one bud still tight in its paper cone on the potting bench, green at the tip and not yet decided. You waited three weeks for it to open. When it did, the blue was so deep it looked wet, with a rim of violet at every edge where the two colours had argued and then agreed.

You cut the stem at dawn, wrapped it in damp newspaper and walked it up the hill to St Bride's, where Halloran's grave still has no stone. The wind off the moor took the scent before you reached the gate. You laid the rose against the fresh earth and wrote his name on the back of a seed packet, because some things only ever grow in the place they were promised.