Woman seen from behind in a hat and open-back grey vest, showing a traditional-style red rose with a diamond shape on her upper arm and shoulder, plus dark lines across her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose tattoo on upper arm and shoulder

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, wearing a felt hat and a grey open-back vest outdoors on a street. A red rose with dark outlines and a small diamond-shaped element sits on her upper arm and shoulder, with bold black linework and red and grey shading. Several dark horizontal lines cross the upper back, and the composition is a natural daylight street shot.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Back Rose Diamond Line Hat Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose went onto the Margaret Ann the spring my father could no longer lift the nets. Tommy Rudd painted it on the wheelhouse door with red lead and a brush he borrowed from the chandler, then ran a black line round every petal so it would show through the sea fret from the harbour wall. The old men on the quay said it was daft to decorate a working boat, but they stopped saying it once they saw how the light caught it at six in the morning.

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Tommy put a small diamond beside the bloom, hard-edged and grey, and when I asked what it meant he said it was for the price of a decent catch and he'd leave it blank till we earned it. We never did fill it in. Irene, the skipper's wife, stood on the quay every dawn with her hat tugged low against the wind, counting the boats out past the breakwater the way other women counted rosary beads. She never once asked Tommy to change the design.

The Margaret Ann went out one March with a north-easter behind her and didn't come back to the breakwater. The rose stayed on the door, faded to rust after two summers of salt, and the diamond stayed bare. When the boat was finally hauled up the slipway that autumn, Irene brought a tin of red paint and a borrowed brush. She went over the petals slowly, black outlines first, and left the diamond exactly as Tommy had left it.