Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose with leaves and a small bud on a forearm, worn by a person in dark clothing.

Rose and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rose in full bloom with a smaller bud and several leaves is tattooed up the forearm, with the flower sitting near the elbow and the stems and leaves running toward the wrist. The design uses fine dark outlines with soft grey shading to model the petals and leaf veins. The image is in black and grey against a plain dark background, with a thin ring visible on one hand.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Bud Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The bus from Coolgardie dropped me at the petrol station where the road bends away from the railway, and the driver had the decency to wait while I got the cutting wrapped. You will laugh, but I carried it the whole way in a jam jar with a wet sock round the stem, like a sick child. Forty kilometres of red dust and the bud still held, just.

The bush rose came from your great-aunt's yard, the one that kept going through three droughts when everything else gave up. Mrs Okafor next door swears it was planted over a well, though nobody believed her until the pump failed in 1979 and the rose kept flowering. I have not told you that before because you would have asked to dig.

Here is the thing I need you to do. The bud on the second stem is the one to watch. Put it in the north bed by the wall, where the shade comes after four, and water it on Sundays only. If the leaves turn to paper, I am wrong about the well and you may tell everyone I said so.

Come home in spring. The pencil drawing of the old bloom is still pinned above the kettle, and I want you to see how the petals look when the light gets under them.

Love, Nan