Traditional style red rose tattoo covering the back of a hand and fingers, with teal leaves, yellow highlights and purple shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large red rose with purple shading and bold dark outlines fills the back of the hand and extends onto the fingers and wrist. Teal and green leaves with yellow highlights surround the rose, and a purple and dark background sits behind the design. Solid colour dominates the composition, with the rose centred across the hand and smaller leaves and buds spreading towards the fingers.

Traditional Hand Forearm Rose Leaves Bud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the cloister door, because the old rose is the reason I'm telling this at all. Brother Ambrose had the garden at Saint Hild's above the Tyne for thirty-one winters, and in all that time the south wall never once gave him a bloom in January. Then the year the frost came in October, there it was, a red rose as big as a fist, bold as a bishop's cope, sitting on the stone as if it had paid rent.

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Prior Edwin wanted the bush grubbed out. Good roses don't flower in the dark, he said, and a thing that won't behave brings the brothers to the wrong sort of thought. So Ambrose was sent out with the billhook and a boy to carry the brash.

He didn't cut it. He sat on an upturned barrow and watched the rose the whole afternoon, the purple shadows under its petals going dark as the light went, the teal leaves beside it catching the last yellow sun. Then he took the boy to the chapel and back again with a lantern, and the two of them knelt at the wall, and the boy swore afterwards that the petals smelled of hot iron and wet earth at once.

In the spring the prior went out to find the bush stripped and tied with string, every stem bundled and labelled for the almonry poor. Ambrose had gone over the moor road with a satchel of cuttings. And the wall, they say, has never flowered since, not once, because the rose had said what it had to say.