Traditional style tattoo of a rose with a red and blue lightning bolt running through it, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and lightning bolt on the upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A rose sits in the centre of the design, with black and grey petals and leaves shaded with dotwork stippling. A red lightning bolt with a blue edge cuts diagonally through the flower, and the whole piece is outlined in bold black linework. The rose is set against a plain skin background, with the photo framed close on the upper arm.

Traditional Dotwork Upper arm Rose Lightning bolt Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, lean in, because the gas is going down the street one lamp at a time and I want you finished before the last tram clanks off to the depot. My grandmother kept a flower stall under the railway arches off Cutter Lane, and that winter nothing sold. The roses sulked in their buckets, petals gone the grey of old dishwater, and she swore at them every morning in Italian, which is the only language roses respect.

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Then came the February storm that rolled up the river and split the sky over the gasworks like a dropped plate. Lightning found the iron gutter above the arches, ran down it in a blue fork, and dropped straight into the bucket nearest the kerb. Grandmother was sheltering in the bakery doorway with a pie in her hand. She swore she saw the rose stand up on its stem, stiff as a sergeant, and the bolt went right through it and out the far side, leaving a red glow behind that would not fade. By morning the petals were deep red, the leaves had gone dark as burnt paper, and a thin blue edge ran down one side of the flower like a line drawn with a ruler.

Most people would have binned them. Grandmother charged a shilling more and sold out by lunchtime. Men coming off the night shift at the power station wanted one to pin on their coats, something that had been struck and was still standing. She kept one back for herself, pressed flat between the pages of the ledger, and it is there now, as bright as the day it dried.

So if you walk under those arches after midnight, when the trams have stopped and the rain has settled into the gutters, listen carefully. You will hear something humming, like wire after a storm. That is the bolt, still looking for the rose. It has never found a reason to leave.