Black ink botanical tattoo of roses and trailing vines across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral vine tattoo on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows roses, leaves, buds and blossoms that climb over the shoulder and trail down the outside of the upper arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft shading in the petals and leaves. The photograph is a close side view of the shoulder in black and grey ink, with the subject's face out of frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaf Vine Bud Blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harrow Crimson had been over our wall since before the Coronation, and by August of 1953 Mr Pellow next door had stopped pretending it was his business to mind. He came out each morning with his secateurs and a face like a shut gate, cut the trailing canes back to the brick, and by teatime they were back, thinner and greener, feeling their way along the coping as if they had somewhere better to be.

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My mother said it was only a rose, and roses were bad luck to argue with. She had sold cut stems from the front step of the shop on Fore Street for twenty years and knew which blooms would last the Saturday market and which would drop by noon. The bud at the far end of the long cane opened in one night in July, a dark wine colour with petals curled back like the hem of a skirt, and my mother cut it for the window before anyone else in Thornbury Cross could see it.

In September I found Mr Pellow on his knees in our yard with a trowel in one hand and a cutting wrapped in wet newspaper in the other. He had taken the length that snaked over the top of the wall and down into his bean rows, and he was pushing it into the soil under his fence as carefully as a man setting a splint. He didn't look up. 'It was growing on my side,' he said. 'So I suppose it's mine.'

By spring the two plants had grown into each other across the coping, leaves on his side and blooms on ours, and nobody in the town could say which of us the roses belonged to. My mother still sold them on Saturdays. Mr Pellow still cut them back every morning. Neither of us ever told the other to stop.