Realistic red rose with black and grey shaded leaves and stem tattooed on the side of a person's lower torso above the waistband of black trousers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and grey stem on the hip

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A realistic red rose sits on the left side of the lower torso, with a long stem curving up and to the right. The black and grey leaves and thorned stem are shaded with soft gradients, giving depth to the foliage. The red petals are rendered in vivid colour with smooth highlights, and the design is set against pale skin with a black waistband in the frame.

Realism Botanical Other Rose Stem Leaves Petal Thorn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's nearly boiled, and mind the good cup with the chip in it. The rose that climbed the back wall of Salt Lane House belonged to Mrs Ada Pardoe, who kept nine lodgers and one bad-tempered hen. She planted it the spring her husband went out on the herring boats and never came back past the Dogger Bank, and every June it opened red as a lamp left burning in an empty room.

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The summer the Ferris boy came to lodge, the bloom went strange. Not dead, Ada swore on her mother's Bible, but the stem had turned the grey of a pencil smudge and the leaves hung silver-shadowed, as if someone had breathed on them and thought better of it. The Ferris boy had a bad cough and a tin of charcoal, and he sat on the back step each evening drawing the bush while the gulls went quiet over the harbour. 'It's sulking,' Ada told him. 'Give it something to look at and it'll behave.'

He drew the thorns first, then the long stem curling up toward the gutter, each leaf shaded darker at the edge where the wind had worked it. When he finished, Ada pinned the sheet to the kitchen wall beside the tide tables and stood in front of it a long while with her arms folded. The next morning the red head had come out heavy and open, the one bloom the grey stem seemed to be holding up.

The Ferris boy left on the Tuesday with his cough gone and his charcoal worn to stubs. The drawing stayed on the wall for thirty years, and every June Ada would stand before it with her tea going cold, saying the rose had done exactly what it was told.