Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile woman and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman in side profile with dark, wavy hair and teal eyeshadow is tattooed on the forearm, with a red rose tucked into her hair at the top right. Bold black outlines define the features and hair, with flat, solid fills of orange skin tones, red, green and teal. The design fills the frame vertically against a plain, light background.

Traditional Forearm Woman Profile Portrait Rose Flower Hair Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The queen of Varrow never went anywhere without a red rose in her hair, and the gardeners swore it had never once wilted. I was the under-gardener then, twelve years old and smelling of blood meal, and it was my job to cut the roses each dawn for the Hall of Mirrors. Nobody told me the trick of it. You snipped above the thorn, never through the stem, and you said the name of the bush under your breath so it would not sulk.

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One morning I found her in the beds before anyone else was up, her dark hair loose past her waist and braided through with green ribbon that matched the teal paint on her lids. She did not turn around. She said, "The bush by the east wall is dying. Tell the Steward it was drowned, not starved." I asked her how she knew. She said the roots told her, and that she had been listening to them since she was a girl in the orchard towns.

That night the Steward sent me to dig out the east wall bed, and beneath the clay I found a tin locket, a child's ring, and a pressed rose gone the colour of old tea. The queen had buried a sister there, and the bush had been planted over her by a hand that wanted it to bloom forever. Every morning since, the rose in the queen's hair had been cut from the bed I was told to keep alive.

I kept that bed alive for thirty years. Each dawn I cut a single bloom and left it on the queen's sill, and each dawn it was gone by noon. I never once saw her take it.