Two black outline rose tattoos with purple, pink and teal splashes of colour across the shoulder and upper arm.

Outline roses with splashes on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The image shows a split view of tattooed skin with several rose heads drawn in bold black outline. Inside the outlines, purple shading and soft-edged purple, pink and teal splashes spread outwards across the skin. The roses are arranged in a cluster, with one large rose on the left and two smaller ones on the right, and the photos are taken close up with soft lighting.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Splatter Splashes Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the sports hall, under the same basketball hoops, and I spent the first hour pretending not to look at the back wall where the sixth form had once painted a mural of roses. Nobody had repainted it. Somebody had simply let the damp do its work, so the petals had bled into the plaster, and the purple splashes looked like weather rolling in from the window.

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Maggie Dunn found me by the squash table. She still had the paint-stained cuffs from the year we were allowed to bring our own jars to art. 'You still owe me a tin of Prussian blue,' she said. I told her I'd never taken it. She said that was exactly what I'd said in 1994, and that I'd been lying then too, and we both laughed louder than the joke deserved.

She told me about her grandmother's garden in Hull, where the roses grew wild over the coal shed, black-edged from greenfly and sprayed purple by the neighbour's bins. She'd traced the outlines onto the back of a seed catalogue, she said, and every summer she took a fresh pencil to them until the petals matched the ones she'd seen at six. Her hands kept moving while she talked, sketching shapes in the air between us.

When the lights dimmed for the raffle, Maggie pressed a folded sheet of tracing paper into my palm. Three roses in bold outline, and in the corner, in her cramped capitals: SPLASH IT YOURSELF. I looked at the wall, then at the paper, and understood that the past was only a drawing waiting for someone to fill it with colour. I went to find a pen.