Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a red rose with green leaves and a black musical clef with dots, placed on the upper back.

Red rose and music clef on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a full-bloom red rose with shaded petals, outlined in bold black, with green leaves at its base. A black musical clef and small dots curl behind the rose, with solid black linework. The rose uses red, green and black ink on a plain, lightly lit skin background, with the design centred in the frame.

Neo-trad Back Rose Music note Leaves Flower

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tully kept the piano in the front parlour of her boarding house on Tarrant Terrace, and it had been flat for as long as anyone could remember. Every guest who sat down to it found the middle C sulking and the F sharp dead, so they played hymns on the other keys and hummed the rest.

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The summer Eli Marr came to stay, he brought a tin of sheet music and a stub of pencil, and he asked for the piano to be tuned. Mrs Tully said the tuner had drowned off the breakwater the winter before. Eli only shrugged and went out to the back yard, where a red rose had climbed the wall unpruned for years. He cut one bloom with his penknife, stood its stem in a dish of rainwater on the step, and watched it open a little more by evening. Each night after supper he sat on that step and played his cornet softly towards the bay, and each morning the rose had dropped a few petals on the flags.

In late August a woman walked up from the harbour with a tuning fork in a leather case, her hair wet from the spray. She said she was Ada Penhale, the drowned man's sister, and that her brother had left her the job in a letter. She sat at the piano, struck the fork on her knee, and listened to the rose tapping against the window glass.

She worked through the night and into the next morning, and when she had finished the parlour rang clear from corner to corner. Mrs Tully wept into her apron. Eli left before breakfast without his cornet, and when the household came down, a single red petal lay on the lid of the piano, curled like the tail of a clef. Nobody in the house would sweep it away.