Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose, lavender sprigs and small flowers with leaves on the upper thigh.

Rose and lavender bouquet on a thigh

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large bouquet centres on a detailed rose with layered petals, flanked by tall lavender stems, small five-petalled flowers and buds. The linework is crisp and dark, with hatched shading on the petals and leaves giving depth. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the frame on the outer thigh, with a white cloth visible at the top edge.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Lavender Flower Bud Leaves Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the barge reached Tewkesbury the lavender in the tin pots had gone grey at the tips, and Ada Pryce was still insisting the rose would hold. You stood on the stern with the tiller under your arm, watching her pick over the bundles of cuttings she had bought off a nursery man in Gloucester, muttering that he had sold her a rose with its roots wrapped in a paper bag.

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"Give it here," she said, and you handed her the knife because you knew better than to argue with a woman who had kept a boat on the Severn for forty years.

She cut the stems on a slant, the way her mother had taught her, and bound them with waxed twine into a bundle no bigger than a loaf. Lavender for remembering, she said, and a rose for whatever the lavender forgot. She tucked a sprig of thyme between them and pressed the lot into the wet bank below the lock gate, where the silt was soft enough to take a hand.

Three weeks later the rose opened on the bank in a single pink hush, and the lavender climbed up around it like smoke. Ada came out in her wellingtons to look, and you watched her kneel in the mud with her hands on her knees, touching nothing, until the lock keeper shouted that the water was rising and she should get aboard before the barge floated off without her. Last April the lock keeper's boy came down the towpath with a paper bag, damp at the corners, and asked whether the lady with the barge still wanted her roses. You told him she did. Then you crouched by the bank, scraped a hollow in the silt with your fingers, and set the first stem in the dark earth, the twine still tight around its middle.