Black and grey sleeve tattoo on an arm, with a portrait of a woman and roses on the upper arm and dotwork flowers on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral sleeve with portrait on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a torso and arm covered in black and grey tattoos, with the head out of frame. The upper arm holds a portrait of a woman beside shaded roses, while the forearm and chest carry dotwork mandala-style flowers, leaves and a moth. The soft lighting and tight framing show the fine stippled shading clearly, and a yellow lace bralette sits against the skin.

Botanical Dotwork Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Chest Woman Portrait Rose Flower Mandala Moth Leaves Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas, the moth came back to the north dome on Tuesday, and I nearly stepped on it. It was resting on the rim of the third mandala bed, where we've planted the old night-blooming jasmine, wings open like a page someone had forgotten to close. I know you'll say it's a contaminant from the hydroponics, and you may be right, but I got a sample jar and it has already fed on the sugar water I left out for it.

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Mum always said the roses on Nan's arm were the only thing she ever trusted to grow without help. The portrait of Nan Vera is still up there too, the lady with the set curls and the thin painted mouth, looking over her shoulder as if she's waiting for a bus that's late. Nan would have laughed at a seed vault. She kept her cuttings in biscuit tins under the stairs of a terrace in Leeds, and when the ration boats stopped coming, those tins were the last real soil the family had.

I went down to the vault this morning and checked the rose cuttings against the ledger. Four of the six tins held. The two that failed were the ones labelled in her handwriting, which makes me think I've been looking at the wrong thing all along. Maybe the point was never the roses. Maybe the point was the moth, which needs nothing from us but a dark room and a flower that opens late.

I'm leaving the jar on the sill of the airlock so the corridor light reaches it. If it lays anything, I'll send you a cutting myself on the next freight. Don't tell the council. Your sister, Ines.