Colour tattoo of a red rose with green leaves on a woman's shoulder and upper arm, shown in soft natural light.

Red rose tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A realistic-style rose in red and pink, with a detailed bloom and shaded petals, extends from the upper arm over the shoulder with a stem and serrated green leaves. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, with soft gradations of red and green. The photograph is taken in warm, low light, with the tattoo in the left of the frame and the subject's collarbone and white top in the foreground.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs man at Ferrin Bridge wanted to see the bag, then the coat, then the bag again. Anna Vell had expected that. What she had not expected was for him to unwrap the wet newspaper around the cutting and go quiet over it, as if he had found a letter in his own handwriting.

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It was a stick no longer than a pencil, grey at the base and green at the top, with one bud closed tight like a fist. Her grandmother had taken it from the wall of the old rectory on the east bank before the water came up and the land was drawn again. The rectory was gone. The rose was not, her grandmother said, because roses are stubborn about what belongs to them. They sulk for three winters after a move, and then, if you have been patient and have not looked at them too often, they open.

"Where is it going?" the officer asked.

"Up the hill, to a yard with a wall and no shade."

He turned the stem in the lamplight. Behind him a lorry door banged shut and the queue shifted its weight. He tore a strip from the form on his clipboard, folded it twice, and bound the cutting to a cane with the thin red cotton he kept in his top pocket for tagging parcels. Then he stamped the form, pushed it back across the counter, and said that the rose was not, under any heading he knew, a plant.

Anna carried it out into the rain. Three winters later, on a morning she had stopped expecting anything, the bud opened against the yard wall, and it was the exact colour of his red thread.