Traditional-style tattoo of an orange rose with green leaves and an orange ribbon looping through its stem, on the inner wrist.

Orange rose and ribbon on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of an orange rose in bloom, with green leaves and thorny stem, is shown on the inner wrist. A thick orange ribbon loops behind and through the stem, and bold black outlines define the shapes. The rose and ribbon are filled with flat orange tones and the leaves have darker green shading, set against plain pale skin.

Traditional Forearm Rose Ribbon Leaves Thorn Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marquee smelled of cut stems and damp canvas, and Dad had been up since four getting the Lady Marmalade to the show in one piece. She was the only orange rose in the county that year, a sulking bloom in a jam jar wrapped in the Gazette, and I carried her between the goat pens with both hands like something I'd found on the road and meant to return.

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Crowther's Travelling Fair had pitched on the rec that week, with waltzers, a chip van and a generator that coughed every time the big wheel stopped. The judge came down the trestles with his clipboard and clean cuffs. He sniffed the bloom, turned the jar a quarter turn, and frowned at the thorns along the stem as if they'd been put there to annoy him.

'Too open for the class,' he said, and then, 'but I've never seen that colour on a stem.' He pinned a rosette to the jar, an orange ribbon with gold lettering gone soft at the edges, and walked on before Dad could thank him. Dad didn't say anything. He stood looking at the ribbon the way he used to look at the speedway scoreboard, as if it might change its mind.

That evening I unpinned the rosette and wound the ribbon twice around the stem, through the thorns, the way the stems look in the old watercolour on the kitchen wall. Then I carried the rose out past the dodgems to the edge of the rec, where the waltzer lights swept round in slow orange arcs. A lad from the chip van asked if I'd won. I said yes, and left her on the bench by the bins, the ribbon catching the light every time the wheel came round.