Large red rose tattoo with black linework and green leaves on the upper back near the neck, in a sketchy watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose with green leaves on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large red rose with open petals and dark sketchy linework sits at the centre of the image, with green leaves and stems fanning out beneath and behind it. The shading is soft and wash-like, with pink and red areas spreading past the outlines and green splashes framing the design. The tattoo is shown on the upper back of a person with dark hair pulled up, photographed from behind.

Botanical Back Rose Leaves Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, you lot, and mind the sawdust, because this is the one about Mrs Pell's rose and the night the big top nearly came down in Wickhaven. Her husband Albert ran the ferris wheel, and she ran everything else, including the ticket box, the cash tin and the cook pot that never once went cold. She kept a single rose in a tin bucket lashed to the back of the living wagon, and it had no business blooming in October, with frost on the tent ropes every morning.

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Everybody said the rose was a bad omen. The fortune teller said so, and she had three cards that agreed with her. But Mrs Pell watered it from the last of the cold tea and talked to it the way she talked to the horses, plainly and without fuss. When the wind got up off the marsh that November and the canvas began to lean, the rose was the only thing in the field still standing bright. Green leaves like wet paint on the boards, petals that looked as if somebody had dragged a red cloth through a puddle of rain.

The men went out with mallets and guy lines. Albert was up the pole with the lamp in his teeth. And Mrs Pell, who had never once in forty years climbed anything taller than a stepladder, went up the back of the wagon with the bucket in her arms and set it on the roof where the wind could find it. Then she came down and said the rose would hold the tent, and that was the end of the matter.

It held. Ask anyone who was there. The canvas stayed put until morning, and when the sun came up the rose was still in its bucket, a little ragged at the edges, and nobody thought to ask why it had bloomed so wide in such a storm. Now, pass me that jug, and mind the hot part.