Colour realism tattoo of a red rose with white feathered wings, a small dove and a water droplet on the upper arm, set against dark shading.

Red rose and dove on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large red rose sits at the centre of the design, with its petals shaded from deep crimson to brighter highlights. Pale grey and white wings spread behind it, and a small white dove's head with a green leaf appears at the right edge. The rose and wings are set against a dark shaded halo on a dark leather background, with partial lettering visible at the top right.

Realism Neo-trad Upper arm Rose Dove Wing Leaves Water droplet Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad cut the rose at five, before the buzzers went, because he said anything picked after the heat came up off the tip would be limp by the time the judges got to it. He wrapped the stem in wet newspaper and handed it to me the way he handed over his snap tin, without fuss, and I carried it down Colliery Road held out in front of me like a lamp.

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Mr Tennant kept his birds in a loft above the bike shed behind the Methodist chapel. Every Saturday he let them out over the pit wheel so they could circle the headgear before coming down to be counted. His favourite was a cock bird called Sunday, white with one grey wing, which he swore could find its way home from Berwick if you let it fly the coast road. Nobody believed him until the summer the fan house caught fire and the whole flock went up into the smoke.

Sunday did not come down that Saturday. We stood in the field with our hands over our eyes and nobody said the word lost. My dad said nothing for an hour, then went home and came back with the rose, still in its newspaper, and laid it on the grass under the wheel. The scent must have carried, because a little after noon something white dropped out of the sky and landed on the bloom, shaking dew from its feathers onto a petal that had been red as a lamp all morning.

Mr Tennant picked the bird up as gently as a coin. Dad rewrapped the rose and took it to the show anyway, and it won. The judges said nothing about the dove, and neither did we.