Traditional style colour tattoo of two red roses with green leaves on the upper arm, outlined in bold black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses with leaves on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large open red rose in the foreground with a smaller rose bud partly behind it on the left, surrounded by green leaves with darker veining. The bold black outlines and smooth red and pink shading give a classic traditional look, with highlights on the petals. The design fills the frame against plain skin, with the tattoo placed across the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Rose Rose bud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the rose on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Court came up through the concrete outside Mrs Okonedo's kitchen window, and every spring the council sent a man to cut it down. He came with long-handled shears and a bin bag, and he never once looked up at the balconies while he worked. The rose did not mind. It had red petals as thick as a child's palm and leaves the dark green of bottle glass, and it bloomed twice as big as any rose had a right to.

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Mrs Okonedo had a son called Dele who worked nights at the bakery on Tanner Road. He came home with flour in his eyebrows and sat on the balcony to eat his bread before sleep. One morning he saw the man with the shears stop halfway through a cut, lean on the railing, and look at the bloom for a long time. "My grandmother said there was a rose like this in every garden in the city once," the man said, to nobody in particular, and then he went back to cutting.

Dele thought about that all day. That night he took a trowel from the lift cupboard, knelt by the wall, and dug around the roots with his hands until the stem came free in one clean piece. He carried it up to the roof, where the wind blew over the car park, and planted it in a paint tin of wet earth beside the water tank.

The council man came back the next spring, found nothing to cut, and stood in the car park with his shears hanging loose. Above him, on the roof, a single red rose had opened, and nobody on the estate could say how it got there.