Colour tattoo of a grey cross with two red roses on the inner forearm of a person holding a black and white dog.

Cross and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm rests across a black and white dog, with a tattoo of a grey cross overlaid with two red roses and green leaves sitting on the lower arm. The cross and scrollwork shading is soft grey with some fine detail, while the roses are rendered in saturated red with dark shading. The composition is close and informal, with the dog's face sharp in the foreground and the tattoo slightly softer in focus.

Realism Forearm Cross Rose Leaves Dog Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the rain has got into the mason's shed again, so the chisels are sulking and I am writing this on the back of a delivery docket with the pen Mr Hallam left on the bench. Tell Mum I am eating properly. The lorry brought the grey granite for the Ackroyd plot on Tuesday, and I spent two days working the cross down to a clean edge, the arms squared so the light sits right along them.

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The scroll at the top was the hard part. Mrs Ackroyd wanted the curls to look like something a hand had drawn in the margin of a hymn book, not something a machine had cut, so I went at it with the fine point and a fair amount of swearing. By Thursday my wrist ached, and she still walked round the stone twice without speaking, which Mr Hallam says is the best review you ever get in this trade.

The roses were her idea, two of them at the foot, red as anything, though the stone itself is nothing but grey. Mr Hallam said roses on granite are a daft thing to pay for, because real ones fade in one wet winter. I told him paint lasts longer than most of us, and he laughed for the first time since Easter.

Today she came back with a jam jar of cut stems from her garden and asked if I would set them in the gap by the base, where the wind can't reach. I did. The jar will be gone by Friday, but the roses will stay red for as long as anyone cares to look. Come up at Easter and I will show you. Love, Nell.