Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose with small blossoms and leaves across a shoulder and upper arm.

Rose and blossom shoulder piece

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose with layered petals sits at the top of the shoulder, surrounded by small five-petalled blossoms, buds and shaded leaves that trail down the upper arm. The linework is crisp and dark, with stippled and hatched shading giving the petals and leaves depth. The piece is entirely in black ink and greys and is framed against a plain wooden background.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Blossom Flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter's wife had crossed the Sallow Pass for thirty winters, and she still counted the bends aloud when the snow came sideways. Nine bends to the cairn, then the drop. In the tenth winter she lost the count, and the mule stopped dead at the place where the path seemed to forget its own edge.

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"Stand still," she told the mule, and it did. Below her, somewhere in the white, she heard a small sound like someone sweeping a step. When the wind pulled the cloud aside for a breath, she saw a rose bush growing out of a crack in the rock, its stems black with frost, its flowers pale as the inside of a shell. Each bloom had five petals, as far as she could tell. Blossoms ran along the ledge like a hem, and the leaves beneath the roses were dark where the cold had got into them.

Her mother had told her the pass keeps what it is given. Offer it something true and it hands back a road. She had nothing but the bread meant for the shepherds at the high hut, so she tipped the basket over the lip and watched the loaves vanish into the grey. Then she sat on the stone and waited, the way her mother had taught her to wait, until the snow thinned and the rose was still there, roots deep in the rock, and the path ran on ahead of her, clear to the cairn. Nine bends, and no more.

At the cairn she wrapped a cutting in wet moss and left it with the hut keeper, who planted it where the wind could not reach. Every spring after that, the shepherds came down the pass with blossom tucked in their collars, and nobody ever again counted the bends.