Back of a person's shoulder showing a colour neo-traditional tattoo of pink roses, a rosebud and green leaves, with grey-shaded foliage fading up towards the neck.

Pink roses and leaves across a shoulder blade

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two full pink roses, a smaller open flower and a rosebud, surrounded by dark green leaves with serrated edges. A trail of grey-shaded leaves rises from the top of the design towards the neck. The roses use soft red and pink shading with defined black outlines, and the design fills the upper back and shoulder area against a blurred indoor background.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Shoulder Rose Rosebud Leaves Foliage Flower Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stock had to be budded before the sap went down, so I was out in the top field by six with my knife between my teeth and frost still white on the briar hedge. Father would have sent Tom, but Tom was in Flanders now, and his letters came in pencil on paper the colour of weak tea. The last one said the mud there swallowed boots whole and nothing green grew anywhere, not even a dandelion, which he claimed was the one thing he would have bet on. He asked me to send him something that would not need a gardener.

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I cut a bud from Father's old pink rose, the one with the cupped centre that smells of cloves in the evening, and slid it under the bark of a dog rose seedling, binding it with raffia and wax. Father's ledger lay open on the potting bench beside the twine. Down its margin, in his neat hand, every variety we ever grew, and beside the dog rose, the single word for what it was good for: stock. I thought of the open wild flowers Tom used to pick for Mother, all five petals and a yellow heart, and how he always gave the buds away and kept the blown ones for himself.

The parcel went out on the Tuesday post, wrapped in damp moss and oilcloth, with a card that read Keep it wet. The postmistress asked what was inside and I told her a rose, and she laughed and said nothing so precious had ever come through her hands in February.

The letter that came back was not from Tom. It was from the War Office, and it was short. I planted the seedling against the south wall anyway, because the bud had taken. In June it bloomed: two full pink roses, nodding over a wild flower with its heart showing, and one bud left closed on the stem, the way he liked them best. I did not cut it.