Black and grey roses with blackberry sprigs and leaves tattooed across a woman's upper arm and shoulder, shown from the side in a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and blackberries across upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical sleeve covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on a open rose with layered petals and smaller roses below. Blackberry sprigs with leaves trail down the arm, drawn with bold outlines and grey shading. The photo is shot from the side with a blurred background, and the ink is almost entirely black and grey with faint pink wash on some petals.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Blackberry Leaves Flower Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last rose on the Halloran plate took Ada three attempts, and by the time she had it right the blackberries behind the tithe barn had gone soft and sour on the bramble. She sat on an upturned crate in the potting shed with her pencil behind one ear and the window fogged with October, drawing the bloom open the way her father used to open a letter, slowly, not wanting to tear the edges. Each layer of petal needed its own shadow. Mr Pelham at the seed merchant's wanted the whole sheet in grey, the sort of grey that looked like rain on a window, with no colour except what she chose to leave behind.

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She chose very little. A wash of rose-pink where the outer petals curled back, faint as a bruise on a peach, and nothing on the leaves. The blackberries hung low and heavy on their thorny canes, each drupelet outlined twice so the printer in Leeds could not mistake them for buttons. Her brother had called blackberries the devil's fruit and eaten them by the handful anyway, purple to the wrists, and she had never been able to draw anything that tasted of him without it coming out ink-dark.

The printer rang on Thursday to say the proofs were perfect except for one petal, which carried a pink stain that would not come out of the scan. Ada drove out to the barn that evening with the original under her coat. The bramble had been cut back to stumps, and a single berry lay split on the path, its juice dried to a mark the exact colour of the petal. She pressed her thumb to it, then to the corner of the paper, and posted the sheet off just as it was.