Neo-traditional botanical tattoo of a pink rose with rosemary sprigs and grey-green leaves across the upper arm and shoulder.

Rose and rosemary on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large pink rose with layered petals sits at the centre of the design, with rosemary sprigs rising above it and grey-green leaves falling below. The linework is dark and defined, with soft, blended shading in the petals and leaves. The tattoo wraps over the upper arm and shoulder, and the person wears a white sleeveless top with their face out of frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Rose Leaves Flower Petal Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the pit head in Hollin Pit, the women stood where the cage came up, because that was what women did when the roof had come down in the Low Ten. Ada Vose held a sprig of rosemary she had cut from the chapel wall, as her mother had done before her, and its needles pricked her palm. Nobody spoke. The wheel turned slow and the rope sang over the pulley.

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Her son Tom had gone down at four with his lamp and his dinner tin. Old Sarah Pike said the shaft remembered every name it was given, and that a name said twice would bring a man back. So Ada said Tom's name to the rope, over and over, until it was no more than breath.

The cage came up with three men and a boy grey to the eyebrows. Then the fourth man stepped off, and it was Tom, walking on his own two feet, with a pink rose in his fist. It was not a rose from the pit. He said a lad had been pinned under the fall, and in the black dark a woman's voice had told him to follow the smell of rosemary. He had found the ways out by it, one sprig after another, and at the last a rose had been lying on the rubble with its stem snapped clean, the same colour as the one that grew by the Vose door.

Ada pinned the rose and the rosemary to his coat with the pin she used for her hat, and they walked home past the spoil heap where nothing green had grown in forty years. The following spring a rose came up on the heap, pink as a shell. The old women said it was the one colour the mine had never managed to take.