Black and grey rose tattoo with a long stem and leaves on a forearm, drawn in botanical linework with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose with stem and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rose in bloom sits at the top of a long stem with three leaves and small thorns, shown in dark ink on a forearm. The petals are rendered with fine hatched linework, and stippled dots fade out the lower part of the stem. The image is black and grey against a plain grey wall and a pale sleeve.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Rose Stem Leaves Thorn Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose came over the fence in the spring of 1958, wrapped in a wet page of the Halifax Courier, and Mr Dunphy swore it had been cut from the vicarage wall the week before the wall came down. Nobody on the allotments believed him, least of all Ida Coyle, who had the plot nearest the brook and no patience for men who talked about walls. She staked it with a length of ash, fed it nettle tea from a bucket she never let anyone else carry, and pinched out every sucker that dared to show itself.

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Every October it dropped its leaves and the stem went grey from the root upward, dusted as if someone had blown soot along it, so that by the first hard frost the bottom third looked more like a ghost of a plant than the plant itself. Ida told the lads it was only the stem thinking about leaving. They laughed, and then they stopped laughing when it came back each June with the same heavy head, opening so slowly that by midsummer the whole row had gathered to watch it.

The year Walter died she did not prune at all. The rose grew wild over the stake and crooked its thorns through the wire, and nobody said a word about it. In July Dunphy came with his trowel and asked, very carefully, for a cutting. Ida looked at him for a long moment, then went to the stem with her knife and took the greenest length she could find.

By August there was a thin, sulky rose on Dunphy's plot, and Ida walked past it every morning with her flask, pretending not to look. Every morning, she was certain, it had one more thorn than the day before.