Colour traditional tattoo of a red rose with green leaves and a stem, in bold black outlines, on a shoulder.

Red rose with green leaves on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A red rose in bud-to-open form sits at the centre, with a green stem and four leaves arranged around its base. The design uses bold black outlines, solid red and deep shading along the petal edges, and yellow-tinted highlights on the leaves. The tattoo is centred on the skin with plenty of space around it.

Traditional Shoulder Rose Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so I stood at the rail with the cutting inside my jacket, its thorns pricking through the wet newspaper like a cat wanting out. Mam had made me promise not to let it touch the salt. I had the stem wrapped in the Thursday paper and a jam jar of rainwater wedged against my hip, and the gulls kept circling as if they knew what I was carrying.

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The bush grew out of the chapel wall on Inish Varra, where nobody had planted it. Grandad swore it had come up through the mortar the year the boat went down, and he never once pruned it, only sat beneath it on Sundays smoking and watching the rain run off the leaves. I took the cutting at dawn with my penknife and didn't ask anyone, which is the sort of thing you do at sixteen when your mother has stopped getting out of bed.

Halfway across, the bud began to loosen. The outer petals were red as a pillar box, but their edges had gone darker, almost navy, where the wind had worked at them, and the heart stayed tight and curled like a fist. A man on the deck with a collie asked what I was carrying. I told him a promise, and he nodded as though that was a perfectly ordinary thing to hold on a boat.

We planted it that evening in the square of concrete behind the rented house on the mainland, where the wind was only ever a breeze. Mam came out in her dressing gown and stood with her arms folded. She said it would never take. By morning a single leaf had unfolded, green as the sea had been, and the rose itself had pulled open to its full width in the grey light, the kind of red you could read from the road.