Colour tattoo of a rose branch with pink blooms, rose hips and green leaves across the upper chest and shoulder, in a botanical style with bold black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose branch across the collarbone

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A branch of pink roses runs from the shoulder across the collarbone, with two open blooms, a closed bud, two red rose hips and several serrated green leaves. The linework is bold and black, with soft pink and red shading on the petals and a green palette on the foliage. The design curves diagonally across the skin, with one bloom at the shoulder and the larger flower sitting lower on the chest.

Botanical Neo-trad Chest Shoulder Rose Flower Bud Branch Leaves Thorn Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the 4.10 is late again and it won't come any quicker for you standing there. You want the rose story? Everybody on this platform wants the rose story when the rain gets in under the canopy. There was a bush on the embankment behind the goods yard, wild briar, dog roses the railway men called them and the signal lads called a nuisance. Nobody planted it. It came up through the cinders the year they laid the second track.

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Nell Garrow kept the crossing gate at the foot of that bank. Her husband Tom drove the 6.40 milk special, and every morning she heard the whistle before she saw the engine, and she counted the carriages to know he was still on the line. One June the bush came into flower all at once, pink as a sunburn, and she cut a branch with her shears and tied it to the gatepost with garden twine. Tom laughed. He said a rose on a gatepost was the sign of a woman with too much time.

The milk special went through the cutting in fog one November and never came out the far side. They found Tom at the cutting's end with his hand still on the regulator. Nell kept the gate. Every June she cut a fresh branch for the post, and every autumn the hips came up red as sealing wax, and she never once picked them, because Tom always said they were the part of the plant meant for the birds.

The 6.40 stopped running in 1961. The gate's gone now, and the bush has eaten half the fence. But when the trains come through the cutting, the hips catch the light, and the lads on the signals swear that's Nell still counting. That's the story. Mind the gap, and don't you dare pick anything.