Woman in a white top with black and grey botanical tattoos of roses and leaves on her raised upper arm, shoulder and upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral tattoos on arm and chest

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white sleeveless top raises her arm, showing black and grey tattoos of roses and leaves on the upper arm and a larger floral piece over the shoulder and upper chest. The linework is bold with shaded petals and foliage, and the tattoos stand out against the pale clothing and the grey floor. The photo is a close, angled shot that crops the face and focuses on the tattooed skin.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Chest Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the north wall would never take a rose, and he went on planting them there anyway, one cutting every spring, because the abbot's garden had been stripped by frost the year before and somebody had to make a start. The soil under the wall was grey clay that cracked like old plate. He carried it out in a basket on his hip and mixed it with ash from the bread oven, and the brothers who passed him at the gate called him the Stubborn Gardener and laughed without meanness.

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The first bush died in the hard January. The second put out three leaves and then sulked. The third, a dark red thing with thorns like a cat's claws, survived because Anselm sat up with it through the frost, keeping a little pot of charcoal burning beside the stem and turning it every hour, the way his novice master had once turned a sick ewe. By Lent the bush had buds the colour of bruised plums, and he cut one and carried it to the infirmary, where old Brother Hugh had not spoken in a week.

Hugh looked at the bloom for a long time. Then he asked whether the north wall was still standing, and Anselm said it was, and Hugh said that was the only thing he had ever wanted to know about the place. He died two days later with the flower in his hand, its petals gone brown at the edges and still holding their shape.

Anselm took a cutting from that bush every year after and set it against the north wall, and the wall is covered in roses now from foot to gutter. Nobody remembers why it is the warmest stretch of stone in the valley. The novices say it is the roses. The old brothers say it is Hugh, and they do not argue the point.