Realistic red rose tattoo with black leaves and script lettering on a limb, shown in a close photograph.

Realistic red rose with black leaves

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large red rose with shaded petals and small droplet highlights fills the centre of the image, surrounded by black leaves with outlined veins. Smooth shading gives the rose depth, and script lettering runs down the left side, partly cut off by the frame. The background is dark and out of focus, so the tattoo is the clear focus of the composition.

Realism Botanical Other Rose Leaves Script Petal Droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire only warms the one side of a body. Down where the trees come right up to the last cottage in Hollin Wood, there was a rose that nobody had ever planted. It grew out of the cracked wall by Widow Pell's gate, thick-stemmed and black-leaved, and every petal of it held a bead of water even in August, as if it had been crying since the morning it opened.

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Tom Harker, the miller's boy, wanted it cut for his bride. Her name was Maud, she had a voice like a wet hinge, and he thought a rose in her hair might soften her up. So he went at the stem with his bill hook on a Sunday, and the blade came back bent. He tried again the next week, and the week after, and each time the bark split and the sap ran red down his wrist like a cut that would not close.

Maud married him anyway, in the end, on the first hard frost. The rose kept flowering through the winter with its dew still on, and nobody in Hollin ever tried to cut it again. Old Pell said it was only doing what roses do, drinking up whatever the weather leaves behind.

On the morning after the wedding, Widow Pell found the droplets had run down the petals and dried on the wall beneath in two letters, a T and an M, with the rest of the word left for the wood to finish.