Traditional style armband tattoo of a red rose in orange, green and teal on a person's lower leg, with a dotted geometric border.

Rose armband tattoo on lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A wide band tattoo encircles the lower leg, centred on a red rose with green leaves and a small yellow flower. Bold black outlines define the rose, and the surrounding panel uses orange and teal triangles and a dotted border. The ink is fresh-looking and sits on a flat, lightly haired leg against a white treatment pad, with a blue tool chest behind.

Traditional Calf Rose Armband Band Flower Leaves Geometric pattern Dot Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had split the threshold of Carrow Keep the spring after the last lord rode south, and by the time Maud Pell came up the hill with her mortar box, it had climbed the north gatepost and put out leaves the colour of old copper. The steward wanted it cut. "Stone doesn't care for roots," he said, and he showed her the crack, a finger's width now and widening with every frost.

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Maud did not cut it. She had a cousin among the masons who had once bound a broken well-ring with a band of dressed stone, and she had seen how the band held. So she set a ring of blocks around the post below the rose, each one cut to a point like a tooth so they locked together. Between the points she pressed river pebbles, one dot to a stone, so the eye would stop there and not run up the post. Triangles of red ochre went in the spaces between, and orange where the sun caught them. The steward called it foolishness. The rain did not agree.

Through the winter the frost pushed at the gatepost and the band took the strain, the way an iron hoop takes the swell of a barrel. In spring the rose came out in a single flower, red as the ochre. The steward sent to Ferris for a painter to make a record of it before the tower fell, and the painter sat three days on a stool in the gateway and drew the band and the flower and nothing else.

When the tower did fall, two winters later, it fell away from the gate. The band lay in a heap of rubble with the rose still wound through it. The steward, who had lived long enough to be wrong about most things, paid Maud for the stones and asked her to cut the next one the same.