Black and grey realistic rose tattoo with water droplets on the back of a hand, shaded in fine detail.

Realistic rose on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose with layered petals fills the back of the hand and extends towards the wrist, with two water droplets resting on the lower petals. The piece uses soft grey shading and fine stippling to create depth, with bright highlights along the petal edges. The rose is centred in the frame against a blurred light background, with the fingers visible at the bottom.

Realism Botanical Hand Rose Petal Water droplet Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has been on the gate since dawn, and Mrs Pryce is standing at the walled garden with the secateurs held out to you like a question. 'That one,' she says. 'The last of the red ones, down by the wall where the sun gets in before it goes.'

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You take them, because she is eighty-one and her knees have opinions, and because it is the sort of rose you would never think to cut. Its petals have gone the colour of pewter at the edges, loose and curling, each one lined with a rim of pale light where the cold has got beneath it.

In the back kitchen the range is ticking. She fills a jam jar at the tap, runs the water until it stops being cloudy, and stands the stem in it on the windowsill. Outside, the thaw has started on the barn roof, and every few seconds a drop lets go from the gutter and hits the stone sill with a small flat sound. You count them without meaning to. She tells you the rose was planted the spring her husband took on the farm, the year the lambs died in the lane and he sat down in the mud and wouldn't get up. He never said why a rose. You ask. She shrugs. 'Stubborn, like the rest of us. It comes back every winter looking like it's given up.'

When the light goes you leave the jar where it is and walk to the gate. Looking back from the lane, you can just make out the rose in the window, its petals gone soft and dark, and two drops still sitting on the lowest one, holding the last of the sun, not falling.