Colour tattoo of a red rose with a small bud and green leaves on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose with buds on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red rose in full bloom sits at the top of a stem with green leaves, a closed rosebud and a small side leaf cluster, all drawn on the inner wrist. The petals use soft shading with deep crimson and lighter red highlights, while the leaves are dark green with fine vein detail. The design is set against plain skin and a dark background, with the stem running diagonally down toward the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Rosebud Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The manifest said forty crates of tulips, and the driver swore on his mother that was all there was. I had worked Halbrook checkpoint for nineteen years and knew how a lie sits when it is trying to keep still. So I stood at the back of the trailer with my torch and waited, and after a while a woman's voice said, from somewhere behind the crates, that the rose would not last if we kept it in the cold.

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It was a single red rose in full bloom, its stem cut clean and wrapped in a damp handkerchief, with a closed bud beside it on a second stalk that had snapped on the journey. The petals were the deep crimson of wine left too long in the glass, lighter where the torchlight caught the curl of them. The leaves were so dark they looked black. She said it came from a yard on Sallow Street, a yard her mother had kept until the new fence went up on the far side of the river, and that she had promised to bring the cutting across before the bush was dug out.

I should have written it up. The form had a box for plant matter, and I could have ticked it and sent her on with a warning. Instead I asked her to hold the jar steady while I checked the bud, which was still tight, green at the tip and red beneath, the way the first ones always look before they decide. "It will open by Thursday," she said. "They always do if you keep the water changed."

I stamped the sheet, ticked the box for nothing to declare, and handed it back. I still think of that bud on the motorway, sealed in its jar, leaning towards the window as if it could already see the other side.