Photo of a red shaded rose tattoo with a grey thorned stem and leaf on a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Red rose with thorny stem on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A realistic red rose sits at the centre of the design, with shaded petals, a grey leaf and a thorned stem curling down and away from the bloom. Soft grey shading gives the thorns and stem depth, and small drips of red ink appear beneath the flower. The photograph is taken at an angle with a blurred background, and the tattoo fills the middle of the frame on pale skin.

Realism Back Rose Thorn Stem Leaf Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the summer roses had gone to hips by the time the parcel turned up on the Scarrow ferry, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with tarred twine. Nell Harrow carried it up the shingle without opening it, the way you carry something that might still be alive. Inside was a single stem, thorns running its length like the spines on a dogfish, a grey-green leaf, and one bud darkened to the colour of wine.

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There was no note. Nobody on the island admitted to sending it, and the postmark had been smudged by the same rain that soaked the twine. Nell set the cutting in a jam jar on the net loft windowsill, where the light came off the harbour in sheets, and went back to mending the trawl. Her grandfather had kept a rose against the lee wall of that loft for forty years. It had died the winter he did, and the wall had stayed bare since.

By the second morning a bead of red had formed at the cut end and run down the glass. Nell wiped it away. By evening there was another. Uncle Tam, when he came in for his flask, looked at the jar for a long while and said roses on Scarrow always bled before a blow. She told him that was nonsense. Then she pricked her thumb on a hook and watched the drop swell, and it was exactly that shade, and she said nothing at all.

The bud opened the night the Maud Ellen was overdue from the Sound. Nell walked the wall in her boots with the jar held against her chest, the petals unfurling in the wind as if they had been waiting for the weather to turn bad enough. At the end of the harbour wall she set it down on the wet stone. A drop of red slid off the stem and darkened the grey, and out past the point a lantern swung, steadied, and came on.