Realistic colour tattoo of a red rose with white baseball stitching and water droplets, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose designed as a baseball on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red rose is drawn with the white leather panels and red stitching of a baseball, with the stitches wrapping around the petals. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and small highlights, and small water droplets sit on the outer petals. The design fills the forearm, set against a dark background with a sleeve edge at the left.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Petal Water droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill on the last Tuesday of haymaking, and by noon the coconut shies were already up on the wrong side of the bridge. Mistress Ada Pell said that was a bad sign. The stallholder was Corran Fell, a thin man who kept a scuffed white ball in his coat and turned it over whenever he thought nobody was looking. Its red stitching had worn pale in places, like the seam of an old glove.

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Nell Dacre, who grew roses up the lane wall, watched him for a week before she spoke. "What's the ball for?" she asked. "Catching," said Corran, "and giving back." She asked what sort of man gave back a thing he had caught. He told her about a red rose that once grew by the river, and how a boy had thrown his ball at it each dusk until the petals split open along the stitching and turned white at the rims. The rose kept its colour only by holding on. "A rose with stitches," she said. "A rose that got thrown at," he said, "and didn't mind."

On the Saturday the fair packed up, the ground was wet and the lorries groaned on the bridge. Corran came to the lane wall with the ball in his hand and set it on the top stone, beside her roses. "Throw true," he said, and walked off without looking back. Nell picked it up. The red seams were warm from his pocket, and the leather had a faint dew on it, as if it had been out in the night.

Next summer the lane wall bore one rose that nobody had planted, red at the heart and white at the rim, with the stitching running round every petal. Nell left it be. When the first ball of the new fair thumped against the bridge, she stood at her gate and waited for the throw to come back to her.