A woman in a lace dress shows a full colour sleeve tattoo of roses and flowers covering her upper arm and forearm, holding hands with a man in a grey suit.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full colour rose sleeve on an arm held by a partner

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a cream lace dress shows a full sleeve tattoo running from the upper arm to the wrist, with large roses and other flowers in red, pink and green. The linework is bold with defined outlines and the shading is soft and layered, typical of traditional-style work. The arm is held in a clasped hand with a man in a grey suit and checked shirt against a dim, concrete-walled background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last boat out of Hallan Sound left at six, and Mrs Quoyle had already wrapped the cuttings in wet newspaper by the time I got down to the quay. Three rose stems, no longer than my forearm, bound at the bottom with string gone grey from the sea air. She would not let me hold them. She said a rose carried in a pocket would die of being looked at.

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Her garden sat behind the kirk wall, where the wind could not reach it, and every summer it went red and pink and a green so dark it looked wet. Her husband had planted the first bush the year they married, a Gallica he'd bought off a man in Kirkwall who swore it had come over with the Vikings. Nobody believed him, and nobody argued either, because the bush bloomed, and the bloom was the best argument on the island.

The cuttings were for her sister on the mainland, who had married a fisherman with no patience for flowers. I was only meant to carry them across. Halfway over, the swell lifted under the hull and one stem slid loose. I caught it against my wrist, thorns and all, and the small sting of it ran up to my elbow. I didn't let it fall. When I reached Scrabster and handed the bundle over, the sister took one look at the bead of red on my hand and laughed until she had to sit down on an upturned creel.

"Tell her it took," she said, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Tell her the roses took."

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