Woman seen from behind with a black and grey botanical sleeve of roses and foliage on her raised upper arm and forearm, sitting in shallow sea water.

Rose and floral sleeve on a raised arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind sits on a wet rock in the sea, both arms raised as she holds her dark hair. Her right arm carries a dense sleeve of black and grey roses and leafy foliage, with bold shading and fine detail across the upper arm and forearm. The bright water and sunlight sit behind her, leaving the tattoo as the clear focus of the composition.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harcourt had carried the cutting for eleven weeks in a tin of wet sphagnum, lashed to the rail of the Marguerite, and by the Cape the bark had gone the colour of old pewter. Her uncle had pressed it on her at Gravesend with a seed packet and a warning that the owners would put her ashore if she let the crew near it. The cutting was a damask rose from a walled garden in Kent, and nobody aboard had seen a flower in three months.

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The carpenter, a silent Shetlander called Ruben Dahl, took to sitting with her during the first watch. He had been a cabinetmaker before the sea took him and he knew wood the way other men knew psalms. Together they bent over the tin and argued about light. He thought it wanted the dark of the hold; she swore it wanted the glare off the water. They tried both. Each night she trimmed a dead leaf, and each morning a new green tip had pushed out, pale as a moth's wing.

Off the Azores a squall took the mainsail and half the rigging, and the tin went skating across the deck. Ruben caught it against his chest with his bare forearm and carried it below, leaving a tracery of scratches from wrist to elbow. When the weather cleared he rolled up his sleeve and showed her. The thorns had drawn a dark lace along the skin, and the wounds had closed into small leaves of their own.

In the Trade Winds the bud finally split, crimson at the heart and almost black at the edges. Nell pinned it to the chart table with a brass tack and wrote the date beneath it in the log, because no one would believe her otherwise. Ruben studied it for a long time and said only that it would keep until Kent. It did not. The log still reads, in her hand, Rose opened. Wind fair. Ruben at the rail.