Black outline rose with red and teal watercolour-style wash and leaves, tattooed on a shoulder and upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and teal rose on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large rose in a bold black outline sits across the shoulder and upper chest, with its petals and leaves loosely filled in with red and teal washes. The linework is solid and continuous, while the colour bleeds past the outline in soft, uneven patches that give a watercolour look. The photo is taken close up and slightly from the side, with the rose filling most of the frame against plain skin.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolde, The Chancellor came to the workshop again this morning, asking why the queen's rose must look like a drawing of a rose and not a rose itself. I told him the black line is the law and the colour is only weather. He did not laugh. He has the vellum sheet pinned to his desk now, the one where the red wash runs past the petals like wine spilt across a tablecloth.

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The commission is for the eastern gate of Caddery, where the stone roses have worn to nothing in three hundred winters. Master Imre drew the outline himself, one unbroken line from bud to thorn, and forbade me to lift the pen once. I kept my promise. I only let the wash wander. Teal for the leaves, because the river at Caddery turns that colour in the thaw, and the cherry lake dye we buy from the Saltmarsh traders. Red for the heart of the bloom, laid on thick, then left to bleed where the damp got into the pigment.

Imre found it on the third morning and went white. He said a line that holds is a promise, and a colour that escapes is a lie told by the hand. I asked him whose hand he thought moved in a rose at dawn. He had no answer, so he went off to find the lead for the gate instead.

The gate is finished. The queen walked under it yesterday and stopped where the teal spilled over the threshold stone. Nobody scrubbed it away. My sleeve has the same stain now, and I have decided to wear it.