Realism style pink rose and blossom tattoo with black lace and a dangling chain ending in an anchor, across a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, lace and anchor on shoulder and upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large shaded pink rose with small blossoms and leaves covers the shoulder and upper arm, framed by black lace patterns at the top and beside the flowers. Below, a fine chain of beads and swags hangs down the arm and ends in a small anchor. The rose uses soft gradients of pink and red, while the lace, leaves and chain are rendered in solid black linework and shading.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Lace Blossom Leaves Chain Bead Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room at the Bridge Hotel still smells of carpet shampoo and the lemon air freshener Mrs Clegg used on the school dinner hall. Forty-one of us have come back for the twenty-year reunion, and I have spent an hour pretending I am not looking for Maggie Doyle in every doorway.

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At sixteen we had a plan. We would take the coach to Lowestoft, learn to splice rope from her uncle Ray, and buy a boat with the money from the lace we sold at church fairs. Maggie's gran had made lace on a pillow with brass bobbins that clicked like knitting needles, and Maggie said that a thing made that carefully could keep a boat afloat. She drew the anchor on the back of my maths book in biro, then drew a string of beads hanging from it, and said that was what the plan would look like once it was real.

I got on the coach alone. Maggie stayed because her mum's hands had started to curl and somebody had to do the buttons and the tea. I sent postcards with gulls on them for three years, and then I stopped, and then I felt bad about stopping for the next twenty.

She finds me by the buffet table, older and not at all sorry about it, and tells me the boat never happened. Then she turns her shoulder towards me, the way you would show someone a faded photograph, and says the rose has held its colour better than the lace. We stand there laughing at the sausage rolls until the DJ starts playing something we both used to dance to in the sixth form, and neither of us moves to the floor, and neither of us minds.