Woman in a pale lace top with colourful botanical tattoos on her upper chest and shoulder, including a rose design and a Stop and Smell the Roses wreath lettering piece.

Floral and script tattoos on chest and shoulder

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A woman in a pale lace top is shown from the side, with a flower wreath in her hair. Her chest and shoulder carry several tattoos: a wreath of script reading Stop and Smell the Roses above, a heart-shaped cluster of pink and red flowers, a handwritten name in fine script, and a rose with leaves on the upper arm. The flowers use red, pink and green ink, while the lettering is in dark teal and black, on a plain light grey background.

Botanical Lettering Chest Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Wreath Heart Script Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at Hollin Ridge nursery in March with a suitcase and a letter of introduction you have already lost. The glasshouse smells of wet compost and something sweeter underneath, and Mrs Ada Penrose is kneeling in the far bed, pruning a rose that looks entirely dead to you. She does not look up. 'Cut it back to the outward bud,' she says. 'Everything else is just hope.'

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For a month you do as you are told. You learn that the old climbers want hard pruning and the hybrid teas want a gentler hand, that the aphids arrive in May whatever you do, and that Ada keeps a ledger of every name a rose has ever been given. She writes them in a faded blue hand: Rosa Hollinsbeck, Ballerina Gold, a nameless cream one she calls Tuesday. Sometimes she leaves the ledger open on the potting bench, and you read it when she is out at the hedge.

In April the first bloom opens on the red bush by the south wall, six days early, and Ada comes out with her secateurs and stands very still in front of it. You think she will cut it. Instead she takes the thin knife from her apron pocket, scratches a line in the bark, and says, 'Write it down. Somebody should know you were the one who saw it.' You open the ledger to a clean page and cannot think of a single name worth giving.

So you write the date, and beside it, in your own careless capitals, STOP AND SMELL. Ada reads it upside down and laughs so hard she has to sit on the step. Then she tells you the bush is called Wren's Last Bet, that she named it herself forty years ago, and that when she is gone you will be the one carrying the book.