Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, a peony and leaves covering the upper arm and shoulder, drawn in fine line with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical roses and peony on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral tattoo of several roses and a peony-style bloom, with rose buds and serrated leaves, spreads across the upper arm and onto the shoulder. The design uses clean black outlines, hatched lines on the leaves and petals, and stippled dotwork shading on the upper rose. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain light background and a maroon top.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Rose Peony Flower Leaves Rose bud Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old gardener at the monastery of Saint Ivo kept a single rose bush behind the cistern, and every spring it bore three flowers and no more. The brothers said it was the bush the Abbot's mother had planted the year the river froze. Nobody asked him why he pruned it so hard, or why he wrapped its roots in wet sacking in the dry months.

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One autumn a girl came up the mule track from the salt towns with a burlap bag and a cough. She asked for work and was given the kitchen, where she scrubbed pans and sang under her breath. She noticed the bush at once, because the gardener had cut every bud from it except one, and that one was swollen and dark and would not open. She asked him what it was waiting for. He said it was waiting for someone to stop pretending they did not know.

She went away that winter and came back in June with a peony she had dug from a ditch, its roots bound in her own shawl. She planted it beside the rose and sat with her back to the cistern until the frost came. In the morning the peony had opened, white and heavy, and the rose bud beside it had split its sepals and curled one leaf over the other like a hand holding a secret.

The gardener cut the sacking off the roots that day and left the bush alone. The brothers still talk about the year the cistern overflowed and the two flowers grew together over the wall, so that the whole yard smelled of sweetness and leaves.