Close-up of a violet rose tattoo with white highlights and black vine outlines with leaves, running down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple rose with vine on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A violet rose with white highlights and soft shading sits at the centre of the image, with black outlined leaves and a thin curling vine. The linework is clean and bold, and the petals are shaded from deep purple to pale blue-white. The tattoo is framed by stems that extend up and down the arm against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Vine Leaves Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has sealed the lane since Tuesday, and the coach from Hexham will not come before the thaw. You take the last candle from the dresser and carry it down the cellar steps, where the landlady keeps the things her husband would not let her sell. Behind the barrels is a box lined with flannel, and inside it a glass bell the size of a teacup, and under the glass a rose that should have died in the autumn of 1871.

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It is not red. Mrs Harrow always said it was the colour of a bruise on a plum, and when the candle moves it seems to hold its own light, the petals pale at their rims like frost on a window. The leaves are inked black along their veins, and a single thorned stem winds out of the bell and into the dark of the box, as if it is still searching for the wall of the garden it came from.

Upstairs the wind leans on the shutters. A man in the taproom is counting coins for a room he cannot pay for, and the fire is down to its last ash. You set the bell on the table beside him and lift the cloth. The light in the rose rises to meet the candle, then steadies, and he stops counting.

"Where did you get that?" he asks.

"It was left against the door on the night the wall came down," you say, which is true enough. "It has been waiting for someone warm enough to look at it."

He leans in. The petals are blue at the heart now, the palest blue of a winter morning, and the lamp in the window across the snow flickers once and goes out.