Traditional style colour tattoo of a dog's face with black ears and a white muzzle, set within a red rose with green leaves, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dog face in a rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style dog's face with black ears, a black patch over the head and a white muzzle sits at the centre of a large red rose. Green leaves and orange-tinted petal shapes frame the design, which is set on the inside of a forearm. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid fills and soft shading in red, green and orange.

Traditional Forearm Dog Rose Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the hinge of the back gate again, so you lift it by the top rail and shove, the way Mabel taught you when she still had hands for the job. Her dog, Bramble, a black-and-white terrier with ears like two folded envelopes, is already through the gap and nose-deep in the rose bed by the coal shed, where the bush has been cut down to three grey canes and a promise.

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Nobody has planted anything there since August. Mabel said roses were like debts: you paid them in pruning and they came back louder. You kneel on a feed sack and cut the dead wood while Bramble sits watching, his white muzzle grey with cold, as though he has been asked to supervise. The thorns catch your cuff. Somewhere over the top field a tractor coughs twice and goes quiet.

By noon the sky has flattened to pewter and you have a bucket of cut canes, a bruise on the thumb and an idea. In the drawer by the Aga, among the seed tins, there is a packet of old red climbers, its picture faded to pink, showing a flower the size of a fist. You push the packet into your coat pocket and go to find the trowel.

In March, when the ground gives, you plant them in the same bed. Bramble lies on the path and waits. The first bud splits red in April, and by June the rose has swallowed half the coal shed. Bramble still sits in front of it each morning, ears up, as if the flower were a guest he has decided to keep an eye on.