Colour realism tattoo of a bouquet of pink and red roses with buds and green leaves, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Rose bouquet on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of full-blown pink and crimson roses with closed buds and dark green leaves, drawn with soft realistic shading. Loose green, blue and purple wash splashes surround the flowers and fade into the skin at the edges. The composition is a rounded cluster sitting over the shoulder blade on the upper back.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Bouquet Flower Bud Leaves Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Aldridge wanted her husband's roses painted before the frost got them, so I went up to the big house on the Tuesday with my box of pans and a jar of rainwater. The roses in the vase on the morning room sill were past their best, petals browning at the rims, one bloom hanging its head as if it had heard bad news. She stood behind me while I mixed the crimson and asked whether I could make them last.

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I told her paint could not keep a thing alive, only keep it looking as though it had decided to stay. I worked from the cut stems and the two closed buds she had kept back in a glass of water, and I let the pink come up soft at the centres where the petals folded in on themselves. For the dark leaves I mixed a green from indigo and gamboge, and I let a little blue and violet bleed out past the edges of the paper, the way wet wash does when the brush is loaded too heavy and you have to give it its head.

She was pleased with the bouquet but frowned at the splashes. "You've spilt something," she said. I told her that was the rainwater, and that the washes were meant to fade into the margin so the flowers looked lifted out of the garden and set down on the page.

Two weeks later the roses in the vase were compost and the painting hung above the piano. In the spring she sent for me again and asked for the same bouquet on a larger sheet, for the hall, where it would outlast us both. I told her I would paint it exactly as before, since the roses had gone to compost and the paint was the only thing left that remembered them.