Woman seated in a car with a dark black and grey rose and ornamental tattoo running along her forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and ornamental tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits in a car with her legs raised, wearing white sneakers, denim shorts, a plaid shirt tied at the waist and a white tank top. A dense tattoo of roses and ornamental patterns covers her forearm and extends up towards the upper arm. The linework and shading are dark and grey, with the tattoo filling most of the visible arm.

Botanical Forearm Rose Ornamental pattern Tattoo Sneaker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth kept the cuttings wrapped in a damp tea towel on the passenger seat, and every time the van hit a pothole the bundle slid towards the door as if it wanted out. Seven hours north from Leeds, the A-roads thinned into single lanes with grass growing down the middle, and she had not once let go of the wheel with both hands.

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Her husband had grown the roses along the allotment fence for thirty-one years. They were dark red, almost black in the evening, with petals that curled like the scrollwork on the iron gate he had bolted in place himself. When the council sent the letter, Ruth took a kitchen knife and a jar of sand and went down before the bulldozers, cutting what she could reach while the sun came up grey over the bins.

Somewhere past Kirkby Stephen the wipers began to squeak. She pulled into a lay-by, sat with the engine ticking, and unwrapped the towel. The stems were pale at the cut ends and tough, and when she pressed one into the damp sand in the jar, a thin green shoot had already come out at the node. She laughed out loud, alone, and it startled her.

She reached the cottage by dusk and found the old garden wall, the one he had always meant to repoint. She dug a hole where the morning sun would reach it, set the cutting in, and kept the torch on it until the soil was firm. Then she sat on the bonnet of the van until it was properly dark, listening to the ticking metal and the wind going through the empty field.