Colour tattoo of a pink rose with green leaves on the inner forearm, in a botanical style with soft shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink rose in full bloom, with several green leaves and a bud, sits on the inner forearm of a person wearing a dark striped top. The petals use soft pink shading with darker red-brown lines, and the leaves are rendered in muted greens with fine vein detail. The design is shown at a slight angle against a blurred dark background, with the hand relaxed at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Realism Forearm Rose Bud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is failing and I will not shout over the fishmongers. The rose I mean is not the dark purple one your grandmothers talked about. This one was pink, the pink of a girl's cheek after the cold river, and it grew in the walled garden behind the potter's house in Thebes, where a gardener named Ammon kept his daughter Thaleia at work from dawn until the bats came out.

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One spring a steward from the governor's house came to buy the wall. He wanted the stones for his new bathhouse and he did not want to hear that a garden could be worth more than stone. He walked the paths with his hands behind his back, touching nothing. Thaleia stood between him and the roses with a pruning knife, and she asked him what he would plant in the place of something that had taken forty years to grow. He laughed at her. He said that roses were only roses, and that a bathhouse could be built on any ground.

So she made him a bargain. If the rose opened by morning, he would leave the wall standing. He agreed, to be rid of her. That night she sat beside the bush and sang to it the old songs her mother had sung over the seedlings. At first light the bud had split, and its petals were the colour of a river at sunrise, with leaves so green and finely veined they looked drawn by a patient hand. The steward looked at it for a long while. Then he went back to the governor's house and left the wall alone.

The garden is gone now, and the potter's house too. But on the last morning I saw Thaleia walking the lanes outside the city with a single pink bloom tucked into her belt, and she was smiling like someone who had won a game nobody else knew was being played.