Blue watercolour-style rose tattoo with sketchy black linework across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Blue watercolour rose on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large rose with a second smaller bloom beside it is tattooed across the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The petals are outlined in fine dark linework, with loose blue wash and dark shading that give a sketchy, watercolour look. Blue ink dominates the design against the pale skin, and the subject fills the centre of the frame with the person's back and shoulder around it.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye had gone into the stems on the Tuesday, a litre to every bucket, and by Thursday the whole glasshouse smelled of wet pennies and cut green. Ray Callow stood at the bench with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, turning a bloom under the strip light the way a jeweller turns a stone. The petals had taken the colour unevenly: blue at the rim, nearly white at the heart, a grey shadow where the outer petals folded back on themselves.

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Nobody in Wisbech had ever sold a blue rose. The buyers at Covent Garden had said it could not be done, and said so with the satisfaction of men who had been proved right before. Ray wrapped one stem in brown paper and drove it down the A1 himself, the passenger seat empty, the radio off so he could hear the cab tick as the engine cooled at the lights.

At the loading bay a young porter took the bucket from him without looking at it. "Pretty," he said, and went back to his cigarette. Ray stood there longer than he meant to. Then he drove home, pulled the sketchbook out from under the seat, and found that the blue had already dried into the creases of his fingers and would not wash off.

He drew the bloom again that night, and then a smaller one beside it, because the large one was the only one he had been able to keep. He never bought dye again. When the buyers asked after the roses that autumn he told them they had gone over, which was true, and kept the sketch in the glovebox where the damp could not reach it.