Black and grey photograph of a woman's upper arm and shoulder covered in a shaded rose sleeve tattoo with leaves and smaller roses.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose sleeve on upper arm and shoulder

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies on a bed with her upper arm and shoulder covered by a full sleeve of shaded roses, leaves and smaller decorative elements. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and tonal, giving the roses depth. The black and white photograph is framed closely on the arm, with her hair and a dark top softening the edges of the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Rose Leaves Sleeve Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now you'll want to know why Ada Lusk kept the bramble by the chapel wall, when every other soul in Marrowby had torn theirs out after the flood. Sit down, the kettle's only just gone off. I'll tell it the way my mother told it to me, with the bits she made up for the pleasure of it left in.

Keep reading

Ada came up from Carlisle in the spring of fifty-two with one suitcase and a tin of cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper. The Dunmore boys laughed at her, because nobody grows roses on the moor, the wind takes the petals before they've properly opened. She didn't argue. She went out each morning with a knife and a jar of candle-wax and grafted buds onto the wild briar, one after another, the way you'd stitch a hem, until the hedge along the chapel wall was shouldered with bloom from the root to the top.

Old Mr Fenwick said it was witchery. His wife said it was a shame to waste good wax. Then the frost came in June, the worst in forty years, and every garden in the valley went black at the edges. Ada's hedge held. She'd wrapped the lowest canes in sacking and sat up three nights beside a paraffin stove, and by the time the church bell rang for harvest there were roses on that wall heavy and dark as cherries left too long on the bough.

She never sold one. She cut a single bloom every Sunday and laid it on the step of the Dunmores' door, and nobody ever asked her why. That's the story, and if you ask me the roses were the least of it. The hedge is still there, though nobody tends it now, and if you stand by the wall in June you'll find the old wax-marks still bright on the thorns.