Black fine line outline of a rose with leaves on the upper arm, with a single band tattooed below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outlined rose with band on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of a rose with leaves and small buds sits on the outer upper arm of a person wearing a dark t-shirt. A plain unshaded band encircles the arm below the rose. The photograph is taken outdoors against a pale, cloudy sky with bare branches in the background.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Rose Leaves Band Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose was already blooming when the carrier came up the hill road, and Nan Hetty swore it had been blooming since the spring frost, when nobody in Mallow Cross had seen a single bud open. She told it to the children on the wall outside the forge, her hands folded over her apron the way her mother had folded them. The bloom had come up through the wet stones beside the well, black-edged as if drawn with a quill, and it had a band of iron wrapped low around its stem where no hand had put one.

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The carrier was a lad called Tobias Renn, who had walked from Hexham with a pack of letters and no sense of direction. He stopped to drink from the well and found the rose, and he thought it a queer thing to find growing in a yard where nothing grew. Old Mrs Dacre came out of the cottage and told him to leave it be. He did not leave it be. He cut a single bloom with his knife and put it in his coat pocket, meaning to press it between the pages of a book for his sister.

That night the wind came off the moor and the gate at the lane's end would not stay shut. By morning the lad had gone back down the road, and his letters were found scattered along the wall, each one with a small dark leaf pressed flat inside its fold. Hetty says the rose is still there, and that every spring the bud is a little wider, and that if you go to the well at dusk you will see the iron band has crept higher up the stem. Nobody in Mallow Cross has tried to cut it since.