Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a man's raised forearm and wrist, showing a rose tattoo with bold outlines and shaded petals. The tattoo appears to be in black ink and grey tones, and the striped shirt cuff sits just below it. The image is cropped tightly, with the background softly out of focus.

Traditional Forearm Rose

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the guy ropes, because the big top has been folding itself up in its sleep for thirty winters and it does not care who it takes with it. You want the rose story. Everyone wants the rose story. Fine. Sit on the upturned crate, Mrs Okonedo, and I'll tell it the way old Pell told it to me, under the same canvas, with the same smell of diesel and sawdust.

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Pell kept the Marrowby Brothers' Travelling Pavilion going after the brothers died, and he kept it going with a single rose. Not a real one. A red bloom painted on a tin board, nailed to a broom handle, which he carried at the head of the procession each night because the ringmaster's widow once told him a company without a flower is only a row of wagons. In every town they reached, some girl from the crowd would pin a real rose to the handle, and by the end of the season the pole bristled like a hedge.

In the autumn the lions were sold, the rain came sideways into Cheltenham and the handle came back bare. Nobody had pinned anything. Pell sat in the mud beside it, turning his shirt cuff over and over, until a little girl in borrowed wellies walked up, plucked a dandelion from the verge, and pushed its stalk into the centre of the tin rose with a hairpin. She said, "There. Now it's a proper one." Pell laughed until he coughed, then he hoisted the pole onto his shoulder and walked on into the wet.

The tin board is in a skip behind a bingo hall in Swindon now, I'm told. The dandelion, if you go and look, has gone to seed and blown off across the car park, and every puff of it is a little white parachute heading somewhere the wagons have never been.