Black and grey botanical tattoo of five rose clusters with leaves inside a rectangular frame, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose clusters in a rectangular frame on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five clusters of roses and foliage sit inside a thick black rectangular border. The roses are shaded in greys with fine detailed petals and leaves, giving them depth. The composition is balanced, with the largest rose cluster at the upper left and smaller clusters spaced around the frame.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Rose Leaves Foliage Floral Frame Rectangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ashdown has you working the burin on the border before breakfast, which is how you know he is still angry about the Whitby plate. The copper is cold under your palm and the frame is the easy part, one hard line drawn without wavering while the lamp hums above the bench. The roses come after, five clusters you were told to leave for the afternoon, and by then the light has moved off the wall and onto the floor.

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He comes back with his coat still on and a proof sheet in his fist. The roses are wrong, he says, and then he holds the print up to the window and you see it. Every bloom leans the wrong way, the big cluster sitting at the top left where it should sit at the top right. You engraved them backwards, the way copper always wants you to. You remember the square of mirror by the door that your mother called the honest glass, and you think of all the mornings you were sent to check your work in it.

Ashdown does not shout. He sets the plate face up on the bench and tells you to ink it again, and when you do, the grey wash sinks into the hatching and the petals open out as if they were turning towards a sill. The frame closes around them. Five clusters, spaced like cards dealt by a careful hand, and not one of them quite where you first planned.

The last print comes off the press at dusk. You peel it from the bed and lay it on the table, and for once the roses look as though they are growing in a window rather than pinned inside a box. Ashdown reads it upside down, grunts, and pins it to the wall beside the others. It is the only one you keep.