Traditional-style grey flower tattoo with orange accents and leaves on the inner forearm of a person wearing a dark top.

Grey flower with orange accents on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large flower with a layered, dotted centre and several grey-shaded petals sits on the forearm, with dark leaves spreading up and down the arm. Solid black outlines define the shapes, and soft grey shading gives the bloom depth. Small orange and peach touches on the petals and leaf edges are the only colour, set against pale skin and a dark top.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Bloom Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The grey rose came up on the south wall of Harrow Lane the week after the fire, which nobody could explain, least of all old Mr Sallis who had sworn the soil was finished. Its petals were the colour of wet slate, the sort of grey you get from a sky that has forgotten to rain, and when the light caught them the edges glowed the orange of a coal someone had forgotten to put out.

I went round with my clippers on the Thursday, half expecting to find it withered. Instead there were nine blooms and a wasp asleep in the middle of one, the little layered heart of it ringed with pale stitching like a doily someone had pressed flat under a Bible. Mr Sallis wanted to dig it up. His wife Edie stood in the doorway with her arms folded and said nothing, which in Edie means leave it be.

So we left it. I have been counting the leaves since, dark as church pews, reaching up the trellis and down toward the gate as though they meant to hold on to something. Last night the wind came off the marsh and I stood outside with a torch, watching the bloom take the beam and throw it back warm.

I think I will take cuttings in spring. Don't laugh. Bring me a jar with a lid, and I will show you what we grew.

Love, Mags