Colour tattoo of purple, magenta and pale blue roses with green leaves, small butterflies and fine dotted drapes across a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured roses and dotted drapes on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three roses in purple, magenta and pale blue, with green leaves and two small butterflies. Petals are shaded with soft gradients and defined outlines, and fine dotted lines hang below the blue rose like a chain of drapes. The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, and the photo is taken from a close, slightly angled view against a dark background.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Rose Butterfly Leaves Dotted line Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is low and the tale is long. In the glass kingdom of Pellmere, where the river ran backwards on feast days, there lived a dressmaker's widow named Oriel Vane who could not sew a straight seam to save her life. What she could do was grow roses, and she grew them on the wall of her yard in three colours that had no business existing together. The purple one bloomed first, in the grey month, when the clock tower had stopped and nobody dared wind it. The magenta came next, loud as a fishwife's laugh. The pale blue arrived last, after a frost that killed everything else.

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The king's surveyor came through that winter measuring the walls for a tax on beauty, which was a real tax and a stupid one. He stood in her yard with his chain and his little brass compass and told her that roses of three colours were a hedge against the law. Oriel gave him tea. She gave him a second cup. Then she pointed at the blue rose and said the surveyor could take it, if he could carry it past the dotted line of the old boundary stones, which hang across the valley like a necklace nobody has worn since the flood.

He tried. Every stone he passed, a butterfly lifted off his sleeve and settled on his hat, and by dusk the king's measuring man was walking home with a crown of blue wings and no memory of why he had come. The roses, I am told, still grow in Pellmere. Nobody has ever again been sent to measure them.