Colour tattoo of a pink rose bouquet with purple violets and green leaves, in a botanical style, on a woman's upper arm near the shoulder.

Pink rose and violet bouquet on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of pink roses, a small pink bud, purple violets and green foliage sits on the upper arm, extending towards the shoulder. The flowers are rendered with soft shading and detailed petal edges in a vintage-illustration manner, and the stems are tied at the base. The woman wears a white lace top and a long gold necklace, and the image is a soft-focus, neutral-background close-up.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Bouquet Flower Bud Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are seventeen the summer Mrs Pargeter's shop on Fore Street takes on the big order from the Hall, forty stems of pink roses for the garden party, and Mr Pargeter says you are to make the bouquets yourself because your hands are steadier than his. The back room smells of wet moss and cut stems. The violets arrive in tin trays from the market at Penzance, bruised purple at the edges, and you sort them by bloom rather than colour because the old woman taught you that.

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Mrs Pargeter keeps a scrapbook of coloured plates from her mother's time, clipped from a seed catalogue, and she props one open beside your elbow. "Tie it like that," she says. "A rose at the heart, a bud for the promise, violets tucked underneath where nobody looks, and the stems wrapped tight so the water can't get out." You get it wrong twice. The third time the bouquet sits in your palm like the plate, the biggest rose opened like a letter folded back.

On the Saturday the bouquets go up to the Hall in the back of the van, and you ride beside them with your knees against the crates. The gardener at the lodge gate takes one look and says they are too grand for a christening. You tell him the lady ordered them, which is true, and he laughs and waves you through anyway.

Years later you still tie a bouquet the same way, the rose at the centre and the violets kept low, and when a customer asks why the little bud sits so high, you tell her it is to be seen first. She laughs, and you keep your thumb on the wrapped stems the way Mrs Pargeter showed you.