Purple watercolour-style rose with black linework and green leaves, beside a small arrow reading faith, tattooed on a forearm.

Purple watercolour rose and faith arrow on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A purple rose with fine black outline and loose purple wash shading sits on the outer forearm, with two green leaves below it. To the right, a thin black arrow carries the word faith in script, with a few small dots and dashes trailing from its tail. The background is a wooden deck and pale clapboard wall, and the colour is mixed between purple, green and black ink.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Arrow Faith Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses on Skerra Holm came up every June the colour of bruised plums, and nobody on the island could say why. My grandmother blamed the peat. The minister blamed the sea wind. I blamed nobody, because I was eleven and only wanted the ferry to come on time so I could leave with my cousin Ailsa for the mainland fair.

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The day the boat was late, we sat on the slipway with our boots off, drawing on the back of an old seed packet. Ailsa could draw anything. She sketched the rose first, the rough outline of its heart, then pressed the pencil hard enough to tear the paper where the petals folded in. I did the arrow. Dad had shown me how the feathers went, three of them, each one curling a little, and I wrote faith along the shaft because Granny said a thing needed a name before it would fly straight.

When the ferry finally came, Ailsa tucked the drawing inside her coat and I forgot about it entirely. Halfway across the Sound the wind dropped and the water went flat and grey as a slate roof. She pulled the packet out to show me, and the damp had bled the pencil into soft violet smears at the edges, as if someone had breathed on it and then tried to wipe it clean.

We kept it. Years later, when the roses came up wild along the dyke again, I found that same colour in the mud at the shoreline and understood the flowers had been borrowing it all along. Ailsa went south and never drew anything else. I still look at the small dots trailing from the arrow's tail and think they were meant for the rain we ran from. Faith, Granny used to say, is just the thing you aim at when you cannot see the target.