Realistic blue rose tattoo with green leaves and water droplets, covering the top of a shoulder and upper arm.

Blue rose on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large blue rose with shaded petals and pale highlights fills most of the frame, with water droplets rendered on several petals. Green leaves with fine vein detail sit behind and beneath the bloom. The smooth, detailed shading and colour blending give the rose a three-dimensional appearance against the skin.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaves Water droplet Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning before the first up train, Edith Crane walked the length of Hollin Junction platform with a tin can of water, and every morning the rose by the waiting room had one more bud on it that had not been there the day before. Nobody had planted it. The porters said it came up through a crack in the cement the spring the signal box burned down, and that it was blue, which roses were not.

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Her brother Tom laughed at her for talking to it. He worked the points and believed only in timetables. 'It's a dye bush,' he said, 'some lad's joke from the goods yard.' But in March the petals opened blue as a gas flame, and drops of dew sat on them long after the sun was up, as if the rose had been keeping them back.

The stationmaster came in April to tell her the line was to close. Hollin had too few passengers, the letter said, and the rose would be ploughed under with the sidings. Edith thanked him, took her can, and watered the bush until the water ran out.

On the last Tuesday the railway ran its final train through the junction. Edith stood on the platform with her hand on the cold iron of the waiting room door. The rose had grown tall enough to lean on the wall. Its leaves were green and fine-veined, and every petal was beaded with water, though no rain had fallen all week. When the train pulled out, the drops ran together and slid down the stems into the crack in the platform, and the rose went pale, the way the rails did when the last wagon had passed.

Tom came out that evening with a spade and found the ground under the cement damp for a yard around. He said nothing about dye bushes after that.