Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose, hibiscus and small flowers with leaves across the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and hibiscus floral piece on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral tattoo shows a central rose beside a hibiscus bloom, with smaller five-petalled flowers, buds and leaves filling out the design. The work uses fine black outlines with hatched and stippled shading to give the petals volume. It is rendered entirely in black and grey, and the arrangement runs horizontally across the inner upper arm.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Hibiscus Flower Leaves Bud Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hibiscus was the first thing I drew for the purser's wife, and the last thing I finished on the crossing from Valparaiso. Forty-one days of salt and tinned peaches, and the only ink I had was a bottle of Indian black that Mr Okonedo kept for his ledgers. I used a sail needle lashed to a bamboo stick and I worked by the lamp in the pantry, where the cook could not complain about the smell.

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The rose was harder. Every sailor aboard had a view on roses, and most of them wanted anchors. Ruth Fennimore, who ran the stores and never once smiled at me, sat on an upturned crate and told me exactly how many petals she wanted. I gave her eleven and she counted them twice. Then she asked for the small white flowers at the edges, the ones that grew wild on the cliffs above her mother's cottage in Cornwall, and I had to explain I had never seen them and would have to make them up from her description. She described them so well that I could almost smell the gorse.

We reached the Downs on a grey morning with the buds still shut on my arm, and I had told nobody what the arrangement meant. Ruth came down to the boat with her sleeve rolled up, pointed at the hibiscus, and said it was the wrong way round, that the rose should be on the outside where the sun would catch it. I told her the sun had nothing to do with it. She looked at me for a long time, then laughed for the first time in six weeks, and I finally understood that the flowers had not been mine to arrange at all.