Watercolour-style pink and purple rose tattoo with black splatter lines on the upper back.

Pink rose with watercolour splatter on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large pink rose with shaded petals sits at the centre of the upper back, with black linework defining its outline and inner petals. Soft purple and magenta washes spread behind the flower, and black splatters and thin streaks radiate outwards and run down towards the lower back. The composition is centred on the rose, with bare skin and a plain pale background filling the rest of the frame.

Botanical Back Rose Petal Splatter Watercolour wash Brush stroke Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on and mind the paint tin by your boots, because I'm telling this once and I'm telling it sitting down. Joss Pellow painted roses on narrowboats at Stoke Hythe for forty-one years and never used a stencil in his life. Stencils, he said, make roses that look posted to you. A free hand makes a rose that looks like it might open if you blow on it.

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The spring Maud's boat, the Good Intent, went in for repairs and the owner wanted her cabin sides done in four days for a christening. Joss sat on the lock beam under a tarpaulin with a jar of alizarin crimson and a jar of violet, working wet into wet so the colours bled like a bruise. The rain came sideways, and every time he lifted the brush a drop fell off the gate and spattered the petals. He swore at it, then stopped, because the spots looked like the grit that sticks to a real bloom after a storm.

On the third morning the gauge at the weir read higher than anyone living had seen. The Good Intent slipped her mooring and went down the cut stern first, and Joss ran the towpath in his socks shouting for Maud, who was asleep below. He reached the bridge as the boat hit it. The hull split along the seam, the timber shrieked, and black cracks ran straight through the half-painted rose.

Maud came out through the hatch with her hair full of river, and the cabin side was ruined, or so everyone said. Joss wouldn't let them sand it. He left the crack exactly where the wood had broken and painted the streaks in black, running down from the petals like rain off a leaf. Maud kept that boat thirty years. Her thumb would find the black line every time she passed, and she'd say it was the best thing he ever did. He'd say the river did it. She'd say, yes, that's what I mean.