Woman with a cigar and an open polka dot dress, showing a black and grey portrait tattoo on her upper arm and a red rose tattoo on her forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and portrait tattoos on arms

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in an open polka dot dress holds the lapel with one hand and has a cigar between her lips, with her face cropped below the nose. A black and grey tattoo of a female face with sketchy linework covers much of her upper arm, while a red rose with green leaves wraps around her forearm in shaded colour. The background is warm and blurred, with the arms and tattoos placed prominently in the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Woman Portrait Face Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Halden Street ever saw Ruth Abney before six, which suited the bakery fine, because at half three the ovens needed both hands and nobody looked at anybody. I started on the night shift the winter my father's knee gave out, and for three months she was the only customer who came in before the trams. She bought one split tin loaf and a paper twist of cloves, and she always stood by the proving cupboard while it warmed her.

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The rose came first, she told me, when she was nineteen, skint, and missing a boy who had gone to Hull on a trawler. The face came later, drawn in grey from a photograph of her mother that had gone soft at the corners from handling. "He got the mouth wrong," she said. "She never looked that sorry in her life." I believed her. Her mother had been a sign-writer's wife who could hold a brush steady through anything.

One morning in February she came in with a cigar she didn't light and asked whether I minded. I said the flour would mind more. She laughed, turned the cigar in her fingers, and then asked me to scrape the bottom of the tin for her, the way her mother used to, because she had a letter to post and wanted the loaf still warm inside its wrapping. I did. She folded the bread into brown paper and slid a coin across the counter with one finger, like a card she was finished playing.

The letter was for the boy in Hull. She never said what it said. A month later a parcel came for the bakery addressed to me, with a tin of Hull rock and a note that read only: tell Ruth the loaf was good. I still have the coin. It is always the first thing I count when the shutters go up.