Realistic botanical tattoo of pink roses with green leaves and buds across both shoulders and the upper chest, with a lip piercing visible above.

Pink roses across both shoulders and collarbones

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The image shows the upper chest and shoulders of a person, with the face cropped out except for the lips and chin. Two clusters of pink roses with green leaves and a small bud sit on the collarbone area and curve over each shoulder. The shading is soft and detailed, with colour ink in pinks and greens on pale skin against a plain background.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Chest Rose Leaves Bud Foliage Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knife has to be sharp enough to lift the bark without bruising it, and your uncle Tobias says the whole morning depends on that one cut. You kneel in the rows at Hollins Farm with August light coming low through the Bramley trees, a roll of waxed tape in your back pocket, and wait for the sap to rise so the bark will slip.

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The rootstock is a wild briar he dug out of the hedge last winter. On its side you make a T-shaped cut, ease a shield of bud from the rose cane you cut at dawn, and slide it under the flap the way you would slide a letter under a door. Tobias binds it firm with the tape. 'Leave the eye showing,' he says, 'or it will sulk and die on you.'

Ten days later you come back alone. Two of the buds have taken, a pale green swelling under the wax, and one has blackened and dropped. You stand there doing the sum growers always do, what lives against what you lost, and find you mind the arithmetic less than you expected. The hedge is already heavy with hips. Above you the apples hang thick, and behind the packing shed a radio is murmuring the cricket.

Next spring you cut the tape, and the rose comes up from the briar in two matching canes, pink as the inside of a shell. Tobias walks the length of the row with his hands in his pockets and says nothing at all, which from him is the same as applause.