Colour tattoo of red roses and green leaves wrapping around a black triangle outline on the forearm, in a traditional botanical style.

Red roses and vine around a triangle outline

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black outline triangle is decorated with three red roses, one rosebud and several green leaves and thin stems that trail along its edges. The bold black linework is filled with smooth red and green shading. The design sits on the inner forearm and is shown at a slight angle against plain skin.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Rosebud Triangle Leaves Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the Abbey of Saint Wenna the garden was not a square, as gardens should be, but a three-cornered bed where the chapter wall, the wash-house wall and the old bell tower leaned together like tired men. Brother Osric had charge of it. Nothing grew there but nettles until the year he set roses along the foot of each wall and let their stems run up the stone and across the open ground between them, so that from the gate the whole bed looked like a thorny string pulled taut around nothing.

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The prior said roses were a worldly vanity and ordered them cut. Osric cut only the dead wood. When a carter came through in February asking for a rose to take to his dying wife in the valley, Osric said there were none yet, which was true, though the buds were already fat and red at the leaf joints. The carter offered a shilling, then two, then the whole of his cart's load of salt. Osric shook his head and said a rose given in a hurry opens in a hurry, and it is no use to anybody after that.

The carter came back in March on foot, after the valley road had washed out, and found Osric on his knees weeding at the point where the walls met. He asked again. Osric told him to walk the bed three times, once along each wall, keeping his left hand on the stone and not touching a single stem. The carter grumbled, but he did it, and on the third turn a bud at the corner split open with a sound like a dropped coin, its petals the red of a bruise going yellow at the edge.

Osric cut it and gave it to him wrapped in wet moss. Afterwards the prior asked why the bud had opened for a stranger. Osric said it had not opened for the carter. It had opened for the walking, and the carter had only been the one who happened to be walking. The prior wrote that down in the account book, under thorns, and nobody has since been able to explain the entry.