Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose, blackberries and leaves covering the upper arm and shoulder of a person in a black vest top.

Rose and blackberry sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose bloom with layered petals sits on the upper arm, with blackberry clusters, buds and serrated leaves climbing up towards the shoulder. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading inside the petals and leaves. The design is in black ink only and wraps diagonally across the arm against a blurred background of shelves.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Shoulder Rose Blackberry Leaves Bud Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The island has two kinds of thorn, my grandmother said, and only one of them tells you it is dangerous. She kept a rose behind the chapel wall, a deep cabbage rose her husband had brought back from the mainland the spring before his boat went down off Eilean Ruadh. Every August the brambles came over the wall from the common, and every August she sent me out with a bucket and a glove with a hole in the thumb.

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I hated those afternoons. The cane hooked my sleeves and drew blood through the cotton, and the fruit was never as sweet as it looked from a distance. But I learned the hedge. The leaves had saw teeth along their edges, the stems were ribbed like rope, and under the tangle the rose kept pushing up its heavy head, petals folded tight as a fist until they opened all at once, as if someone had tipped them out of a jar.

The summer I turned sixteen I cleared the last of the cane and found the old root had grown straight through the bramble, the two of them knotted so tightly that cutting one meant cutting the other. I took my knife to it and stopped. I told her the rose could keep the wall and the brambles could have the rest of the island.

She laughed until she coughed, then made me pick the fruit anyway. By dusk my fingers were purple to the knuckle, and the rose behind the wall had dropped one petal on the path, pale and creased, like a note left for someone who had not yet come back.