Traditional red rose tattoos with green leaves cover the backs of two clasped hands, with black outlines and shading.

Red roses on the backs of both hands

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, each showing a large red rose with green leaves on the back of the hand. The bold black outlines, solid red petals and dark shading around the blooms are typical of traditional tattooing. Small letters are partly visible on the knuckles, and the plain grey pavement and dark clothing keep the focus on the tattoos.

Traditional Hand Rose Leaves Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae Harrow had painted roses on shopfronts along Tanner Street for thirty years, and she knew a red that would still look honest after a wet winter. She mixed her own from madder root and a pinch of lead, and nobody else in the town was allowed to stand near her pot while she stirred it.

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The trouble started when the new chemist wanted his window done by Saturday and offered three times her price for gold lettering with no flowers at all. Mae sent him off with a flea in his ear. That night her nephews Danny and Ray came round with cold hands and a bottle of cider, and asked her to paint roses on their hands so the whole street would know they were a pair. She told them roses were for shopfronts, not knuckles. They laughed and held their fists out anyway.

She worked at the kitchen table with the finest brush she owned. Black outline first, then red petals packed tight, shadow pooled under each bloom like rain gathering in a cup. On the knuckles she put the letters their mother used to stencil onto bread tins, H O L D, and she made them small enough that a man could still hold a spoon. When she was done, the boys pressed their palms together and the two roses met in the middle of the table like a pair of lamps.

The chemist came back in the spring with a cracked pane and no one to mend it. Mae walked past him with a pail of red and didn't slow down. Ray said it was the first time he had ever seen his aunt walk past money, and Danny said nothing, only lifted his hand to show the bloom had not faded at all.