Black fine line outline of two roses with leaves on a woman's shoulder, with a cursive script line running across the upper chest.

Outline roses and script on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's back and shoulder showing a black outline tattoo of two roses with leaves, the larger rose sitting over the top of the shoulder. A thin cursive script line runs across the upper back towards the collarbone. The linework is clean and unshaded, in black ink only, and the roses fill the upper right of the frame against bare skin.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaves Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bride's mother had sent three men to the hills for white roses, and all three came back with bloody hands and empty baskets. It was the day before the wedding in Carrow Dale, and the church bell had already been rung twice for no reason but nerves. Tamsin Holloway, who had kept the bees since her husband drowned in the mill race, walked up the lane with a pail of borage honey and an answer nobody had asked for.

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"Roses don't bloom in the frost," the mother said. "Everyone knows that."

Tamsin set the pail down on the step. "They bloom where someone is sorry for them," she said, and went out to the wall behind the old rectory, where a briar had grown through the stones for forty years and never once flowered. She knelt in the wet grass and spoke to it the way her grandmother had taught her, low and plain, about the bride, the groom, and the long road between their two farms. Then she cut the first thorn free and sucked the blood off her thumb.

By morning the briar was crowded with pale blooms, each one edged in a thin dark line as if someone had gone over them with a fine pen. The mother cried when she saw them. The groom's brother carried them up the aisle in both arms. Nobody thought to ask who had been sorry, or what it had cost, and Tamsin never told them.

She went home and wrote the old words on the inside of her hive lid, where the bees could hear them: keep what is beautiful, and hold it lightly.