Black linework botanical tattoo of a full rose with a small bud and leaves on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and bud on the inner upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose with layered, ruffled petals fills the right side of the image, with a smaller bud and leaves extending from a stem to the left. The design uses fine black outlines with light hatched shading on the petals and leaves, and the skin behind it is unmarked. The composition is centred on the arm against a plain pale background.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Rose Bud Leaves Stem Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting came up from Lowestoft in March, wrapped in wet sacking and a page torn from a herring curer's ledger, its one bud already swollen to the size of a barley grain. Tobias Wren turned it over on the kitchen table and did not know the wood at first. Then he saw how the stem bent twice before it straightened, and his hands went cold, because it was Ellen's rose, the one she had coaxed up the south wall of their cottage in Hythe before the winter she stopped going out to the garden.

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His brother Amos had written four lines. The drifter Margaret Lee was going out to the Dogger Bank for the autumn season, and Amos had taken the cutting the night before the crew went down to the quay. He wanted it to have some salt air in it, he said, before it went back into the ground. The wall rose itself had gone to briar. Tobias had not pruned it in six years, and he stood in the wet garden with the secateurs in his coat pocket, unable to face the thorns.

He grafted the cutting onto a wild stock on the Thursday, and only then found the note tucked under the sacking, folded small, in Ellen's square hand. Cut it back hard in March, it only flowers for those who are firm with it. He laughed out loud in the empty kitchen, then sat down rather suddenly.

In May the bud opened. Its petals came out in ruffled layers, pale at the edges, like the collar of a good coat turned up against weather. Tobias carried a single bloom down to the harbour wall and left it on the stone where the Margaret Lee would tie up, and when her lamps came round the point at dusk he could see the men already at the rail, looking up at the cottages as if they knew which one was his.