Black and grey rose tattoo on an upper arm and a small script tattoo on the forearm, shown in a kitchen with a blue mug.

Rose tattoo on upper arm and small script on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black crop top and grey sweatpants holds a blue mug in a kitchen, with her face cropped out of frame. A shaded black and grey rose with leaves covers the upper arm, and a small script tattoo sits on the forearm. The composition centres on the arms and midriff against dark wall tiles.

Botanical Forearm Upper arm Rose Floral Script Mug

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Harrowgate was working the blackspot out of the old Tuscany Superb when the boy from next door came over the wall with his hands in his pockets. The bush had come from her husband's cuttings, rooted in a jam jar on a windowsill in a rented flat in Leeds, and it had outlived him by eleven winters. Nobody else on Holly Terrace grew a rose that colour. In the afternoon the petals looked less like red than like ash someone had breathed on.

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"Mum says the council's cutting the hedge on Friday," Tobias said. "She wants to know if you'll let her have one for the funeral." Maud looked at him over her reading glasses. Mrs Okafor had been a nurse at the Infirmary for thirty years and had never once asked Maud for anything. "Tell her she can have the last bloom," Maud said. "Tell her to come herself and fetch it."

The frost came that night, hard and early. Maud dragged an old fleece over the bush and weighted its edges with bricks, then sat at the kitchen window with the light off, watching the street go white under the lamps. In the morning the fleece was stiff and furred, and the one bud she had missed had opened anyway, its petals silvered at the edges like a coin left in the rain.

She cut it at eight with the good secateurs and carried it through the gate. Mrs Okafor came out in her dressing gown and took the stem without a word, holding it the way you would hold something that might still be warm. Back in the house, Maud took her late husband's seed catalogue from the shelf, pressed the one remaining petal she had kept from the summer between its pages, and wrote the date beneath it in pencil, as if the garden needed a record of what had been given away.