Traditional style colour tattoo of a red and orange rose with green leaves on the inner wrist, shown with the hand raised against a wooden table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose on an inner wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bright red and orange rose in full bloom, with dark red shading on its outer petals and green leaves at the base. The bold black outlines and saturated colour are typical of traditional tattooing, and the shading gives the petals some depth. The rose sits on the inner wrist, photographed against a dark wooden surface with the hand raised.

Traditional Forearm Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Thursday at twelve minutes past six the Crewe train came in with its doors jammed half open, and every Thursday a man in a wet grey coat bought one red rose from my kiosk on platform four. He paid in coins, always exact, and never once looked at the flowers. He looked at the clock above the tracks as though it owed him money.

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The roses came up from a grower outside Stoke in cardboard boxes that smelled of wet soil. Most went cheap by closing time, petals bruised, heads bowed. I kept the best back for him. The bloom was tight and orange at the heart, darkening to wine red where the outer petals folded over, with leaves as glossy as a bottle top. My mother grew the same kind by the back gate in Hanley, and I suppose that is why I never charged him more than the price chalked on the bucket.

One January he didn't come. Nor the Thursday after. In the third week a girl in a green anorak arrived at the kiosk holding an envelope addressed to me, care of the station, in handwriting that leaned into the wind. Inside was a biro sketch of a rose with every petal numbered, and a note: The 6.12 was cancelled for good in the spring. He said you would know what to do with the last one.

I took the final bunch from the bucket, laid a single stem on the bench where he used to stand, and watched the clock until platform four went blue with dusk and the rose's red had dulled to the colour of old brick.