Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral profile on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a side-profile head outline filled with large roses, smaller blossoms and leaves, with a dark tie and collar shape below. The linework is bold and the shading uses dense dotwork and hatching to build tone across the flowers and the tie. The design is rendered entirely in black ink and grey tones against pale skin, with the subject filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Forearm Profile Head Rose Flower Blossom Leaves Tie

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell Anstruther had been Crown Registrar of Osmere for eleven years before anyone noticed that the petitions he stamped all shared the same careful hand, and that the hand belonged to nobody in the chancery. The king's surveyor, a thin man named Tobias Quell, came up from the coast to ask about it. Pell offered him tea in the cramped back room, where the windows were heavy with geraniums he had coaxed from cuttings, and said nothing for a long while.

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When he finally spoke, he spoke about roses. Each petition, he said, had been written by a rose that bloomed in the chancery garden, and he had only copied them down because roses cannot hold a pen. Quell laughed, then stopped, because the registrar did not look like a man making a joke. His starched collar was buttoned to the throat and his dark tie sat straight, and the flowers pressing at his temple seemed to lean toward the window as if listening for rain.

Quell went back to the coast and wrote a report that said only that the crown's paperwork was sound. The king, who had once been a boy in that same garden, read the next petition aloud at supper. It asked that the frost be kept off the lower terraces and that the registrar be allowed to keep his blossoms. The order was signed the following morning in ink the colour of dried rose hips, and the surveyor, who had never cared for gardens, found himself walking past the chancery windows each evening just to see what was in bloom.