Pink rose tattoo with sketchy black linework and green leaves on the upper back, seen from behind.

Pink rose with green leaves on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A photograph taken from behind of a pink rose tattoo on the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The rose is drawn with loose, sketched black outlines and hatching, with soft pink wash shading and splashes of pink bleeding beyond the lines. Green leaves with black linework frame the rose on the lower left, lower right and top, and the skin tone is neutral against a grey background.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Leaves Petal

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the rose on the south wall of Lowfield farmhouse the way you find everything in January, by working backwards from the cold. Your fingers are numb inside the gloves and the ladder rungs are slick with rime. Nobody has pruned it since Ida Harker went into the home in Settle, so the canes have gone wild and grey, hooked into the render as if they want to come in out of the weather.

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Ida's letter is folded in your breast pocket, the one the solicitor's clerk handed over with the keys. It asks you to cut the rose back to three buds above a healthy eye, and to leave the top cane alone because it was her mother's cutting from Wensleydale. You do as she says. The secateurs bite through the deadwood with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and the sap underneath is green, which tells you the plant is still alive where it counts.

By four the light has gone the colour of dishwater and you are packing up. Then you notice the top cane you were told to leave has split its sepals in the frost. A single petal the colour of raspberry juice has pushed out, bleeding into the leaf at its edges where the cold has smudged the wash.

You stand on the bottom rung, breath clouding over the bloom, and write Ida a note on the back of the clerk's envelope. It's flowering, Ida. Out of season, the daft thing. Come and see it before the wind does.