Woman seen from behind with arms raised, showing a rose tattoo on her upper arm and shoulder in muted red and grey ink.

Rose tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman seen from behind lifts both arms overhead while her long hair blows in the wind, showing a large rose tattoo across her upper arm and shoulder. The rose appears shaded with soft grey and dark tones alongside red and brown, with small fine line marks visible on her forearm and wrist. The blurred desert landscape and warm light keep the focus on the tattoo and her pose.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Floral Hair Desert

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had not come to Sallow Wash for eleven years when Ada Pryce found the rose. It grew from a split in the red sandstone, its stems bent flat against the rock as if something heavy had leaned on them, and its petals were the colour of wet brick going dark at the edges. Nobody in the valley had planted it. The survey maps showed the wash as a dotted line and nothing more, so Ada wrote the rose into her field book under a heading she never explained to anyone: things still arriving.

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She visited it each evening once the heat broke, carrying a tin of water on the back of her mule, Dunmore, who disliked the wash and said so with a long, aggrieved sigh. Ada poured a cup over the roots and sat with her back against a boulder while the shadows crept across the mesa. Her brother had gone east to work the railway lines and had not written since spring. She told the rose about him. The rose, being a rose, said nothing, though a lizard once ran across her boot as if it agreed.

In the third week of August a storm came up over the Carrick range, black at the base and lit from inside. Ada sheltered the mule under the overhang and watched the first fat drops hit the sand. By the time the water reached the rose, it had opened fully, every petal turned toward the falling rain, and the grey in its centre had gone the soft sooty shade of cloud pressed close to the ground.

She walked back to camp in the dark with the wind pulling at her coat, and when Dunmore protested she laughed for the first time since spring. Three days later a telegram came from the east. Her brother was on the Thursday train. Ada drew the rose again in the margin of the telegram, then pinned it to the wall beside the window, where the wind off the mesa could reach it.