Back view of a woman in a white top with a colour tattoo of red roses, buds and dark green leaves on her left shoulder near the collarbone.

Red roses on the shoulder and collarbone

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with her blonde hair falling over one shoulder. A cluster of red roses, two open blooms and a bud, with dark leaves and stems, sits on the upper shoulder and collarbone area. The roses are shaded in red and pink with soft, painterly tones, and the soft natural light and blurred background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Rose bud Leaves Flower Woman Blonde hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Fenwick kept the orchard above Hollin Bank, where the pears gave out in August and the wasps came in drunk on the windfalls. Her mother had told her never to let the wild rose by the gate be cut, though it was ragged and gave nothing to eat. So when the stranger in the grey coat stopped to ask for water, Ada brought it to him in a tin cup and watched him drink without once looking at the trees.

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He thanked her and asked what the rose was for. Nothing, she said. It was there before the wall was. He smiled at that and said he would pay for the water in the only coin he carried, which was a bud. He pressed it into her palm. It was closed tight and smelt of rain on warm stone. Plant it, he said, and wait until it has opened twice. Then walk to the crossroads, and you may ask one thing and be given it.

She planted it at the gate beside the old briar. It did not bloom that autumn, nor the spring after, but in the third late summer, when the apples hung heavy and the grass had gone the colour of straw, two full roses opened at the top of the stem, and a third bud hung below them, red as a held breath.

Ada walked to the crossroads with the bud wrapped in a handkerchief. The grey coat was there, though nobody had seen it come. She laid the rose on the stone and asked that her mother's hands be well again. The stranger said that was a fair asking, and by the time the sun touched the top of the pear trees, her mother was at the gate, shelling peas, singing the old song about the miller's boy.