Traditional style colour tattoo of three red roses and a rosebud with green leaves on the side of a person's body, with black star tattoos on the arm beside it.

Red roses with green leaves on the side

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The design shows three full red roses of different sizes, with a small rosebud at the lower edge, all surrounded by dark green leaves. The roses use bold dark outlines and heavy shading that fades to deep purple-red in the petals, with lighter orange highlights on the upper petals. The tattoo fills most of the frame against warm skin, with black star tattoos visible on an arm at the upper right.

Traditional Botanical Ribs Rose Rosebud Leaf Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gardener's daughter had planted three roses along the wall the spring her father stopped speaking to the miller, and by midsummer they had grown taller than the gate. Red as a fox in the hedge, her mother said, though the first bloom was more the colour of bruised plums at its heart, and the petals curled outward at the edges like the lips of a cup left in the sun.

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Every evening the miller's boy came to the wall to ask after the roses. He wanted a cutting for his sister's wedding. Each night the girl said no, and each night he left a green leaf on the coping stone, folded small, as a kind of payment she had not asked for. By August there were a dozen leaves stacked under a pebble, and the bud at the foot of the bush had not opened, though it had swelled and turned the colour of a cherry.

On the feast of Saint Oswald the girl went out before light with the shears and found the largest rose had split its petals in the night, orange at the tips where the dew had caught the sun. Beneath it, pressed flat to the earth, lay a cutting already wrapped in damp cloth, and a note in the miller's boy's crooked hand that said only: you were always going to give it, and I was always going to ask.

She cut the rosebud that morning and carried it down the lane herself. The wall, she found, had been a poor fence all along.