Realistic colour tattoo of a blue eye set within an orange rose on a calf, with part of another tattoo visible at the right edge.

Eye within an orange rose on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A detailed blue iris and dark lashes sit at the centre of a large yellow and orange rose, with the petals wrapping around the eye. The eye uses fine, smooth shading and highlights, while the petals have soft gradients and crisp red-edged outlines. The rose fills most of the frame against a dark background, and a partial tattoo with red and black detailing appears at the right edge.

Realism Botanical Calf Rose Eye Iris Eyelashes Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The rose you sent cuttings of came up in the spring, though not where you would want it. Mrs Hebden has given it the corner by the coal shed, where the soot settles thickest, and yet the petals have turned the colour of marmalade, orange at the heart and gold at the edges, as if they had been dipped in lamp oil. Everyone on Cinder Row walks past to look at it. Nobody says much.

Last Tuesday the back wall of the Ellison pit gave way at the fourth level, and the men came up in ones and twos through the cage. Mr Hebden came up last, his eyes red from the dust, so he took his cap off and stood a long while at the gate. When I asked him what he had seen down there he said only that a lamp had gone out, and then, on the far side of the roadway, a second light had opened, blue as a gas flame, watching him until he found the stair.

I went to the coal shed the next morning with a trowel, meaning to dig the thing out. The bloom had opened overnight, and in its middle, where the stamens should be, there was a blue iris, wet and steady, looking up at me as if it had been waiting for someone to come and check the seams. I did not dig. I sat on the upturned bucket and let it look.

Mr Hebden has taken the bloom into the pit office in a jam jar. The manager says it is a fancy and must go. I think it will go wherever the men go, and I think it will keep watch. Come home at Christmas and bring the cutting you are growing in Newcastle. We will see which of us it likes better.

Your sister, Margaret