Black and grey fine line botanical tattoo of a rose, leaves and bud on the upper arm of a woman wearing a red lace bralette.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical rose and bud on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A botanical illustration of an open rose, a small bud and several leaves on a stem with a thin root, drawn in black ink. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled shading on the petals and leaves. The tattoo sits on the upper arm just below the shoulder, with the rest of the frame showing a red lace bralette against a plain light background.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem Root Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had wrapped the rose root herself in wet sphagnum and brown paper at five in the morning, because the porter at Holm Bridge would not touch anything that dripped. Platform two was empty except for a stack of milk churns and a boy kicking a cap along the cinders. She had drawn the rose three times that week with a steel nib, redrawing the bud twice before the stem sat right, and now the sketch lay folded in her coat pocket like a second ticket.

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The parcel was addressed to Mrs Thorne at Greyleigh Rectory, care of the stationmaster, who had the decency to read the label aloud and then frown at it. "Roots don't travel well in a guard's van," he said. "Keep it upright." Ada said she knew. The train came in smelling of coal smoke and damp wool, and she handed the parcel up to a guard who held it the way you might hold a sleeping cat. The whistle went before she could say what she had meant to say, which was that the bud was the hard part, and that the root would only look like a dead twig until spring.

Four months later a letter came back in a hand that shook a little at the loops. Mrs Thorne wrote that the rose had pushed through the frost in March, that the bud had opened against the wall by the coal shed, and that she had sent a cutting, wrapped in the same brown paper, to a sister in Carlisle. Pressed between the pages was a single leaf, still green at the edges.

Ada pinned the leaf above her drawing board and went down to platform two the next morning with a fresh parcel under her arm. Nobody had ordered anything from Greyleigh, but she stood by the milk churns anyway and waited for the stationmaster to come out and frown at her.