Colour traditional-style rose tattoo on an upper arm beside a black and grey floral tattoo on the shoulder, with a person whose hair is braided and dyed teal, pink and purple.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral tattoos on upper arm and shoulder

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A person with their head turned away wears a dark navy t-shirt and has a braided updo dyed in teal, pink and purple. A colour floral tattoo with a large rose-like bloom and green foliage sits on the upper arm, and a black and grey floral tattoo is visible on the shoulder at the lower left. The shading is soft and the composition is a casual indoor bedroom snapshot with the tattoos clearly shown.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Flower Rose Leaves Braid Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose by the wash-house wall had never bloomed in the village's memory, not until the spring the miller's youngest, Edith Carrow, came up the lane with a bundle of dyed wool under her arm and asked for the loan of a spade. Her mother said the ground was cursed. Edith said the ground only wanted feeding, and she had three colours to give it: teal from the woad vat, pink from the madder pot, and purple from the dark elderberry.

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She dug the soil at the root and knotted the wool into the earth, then sat against the wall and plaited her own hair in a crown while she waited. Each morning she came back and the bush had grown a hand higher. Its leaves came up green as pond weed, and by midsummer the first bloom opened, large and heavy as a fist, its petals layered like a cabbage heart, the centre gone the colour of a bruise on a plum.

The vicar came to see it and said it was against nature. The miller said it was against the price of wool. Edith said nothing. She cut one bloom and carried it out across the fen to the old drowned church, where the bell tower still stood out of the water, and laid it on the surface. The bloom floated and did not sink, and the eels came up through the reeds to look at it.

That winter the frost came hard and the bush kept its colours under the snow. In spring the children found the wool still tied at the roots, the strands knotted together into a braid, and nobody in the village dared to pull it out.