Traditional style red rose with a bud and green leaves, outlined in black, tattooed on the side of a woman's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and bud on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Colour · Photo

A large red rose with black outlines sits on the side of the neck, with a smaller closed rosebud above it and olive-green leaves curving around its base. The petals are filled with solid red and soft shading, with dark shadowing at the centre of the bloom. The photo is taken close up from behind and to the side, with the hair and ear gauges partly in frame and a blurred background.

Traditional Botanical Neck Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose came over the wall in the June my father stopped speaking to the head gardener, which is how I ended up with the walled garden at Hollin Park. Nobody had pruned the old Crimson Pelham since the war. Its canes had climbed the brick like rigging, and at the top of the third arch one bud sat closed, green at the tip and red where the sun caught it, refusing to be anything but a bud.

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I cut it back every March for six years and it never opened. Mr Ashdown, who had kept the glasshouses for forty years and trusted nothing that had not been dead a week, said it was a shy plant. He said a rose that will not open is either lonely or lying. I took a cutting from the stem anyway and rooted it in a jam jar on the bothy windowsill, where the kettle steamed the glass every morning and the cutting put out three inches of thin red shoot.

In November the frost came early and took the old bush down to its roots. I went out with a fork expecting to find nothing, and under the mulch I found the bud, black at its heart from the cold, its outer petals curled back like the lip of a tin. It had opened once in the dark and frozen in the act. Mr Ashdown leaned on the gate with his cap in his hands and said nothing for a long time.

I planted the cutting in loam by the gate. By spring it had a single leaf. I left the old bud on the wall, where the dark centre still shows through the red when the light is low.