Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, buds and leaves running down the upper arm, photographed against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and foliage on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two large roses with smaller blooms, buds and leaves climbs the upper arm of a person wearing a black sleeveless top. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading built up from stippled dots and hatching in the petals and leaves. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink, and the photograph is taken from the side against a red brick wall.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Rose Flower Bud Leaves Foliage Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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You will think I've lost my wits, writing to you from the back step of the Dyson farmhouse with a stub of pencil, but the wedding has gone to pieces and I have nobody else to tell. Marjorie's roses came up black. Not dead, black. Every bloom on the long wall opened overnight with its petals gone to grey and stippled like a newspaper photograph, and the leaves were hatched so dark they looked as though someone had gone over them with a nib.

Her father swears it was frost from the coal shed. I say the frost never touched the bricks, and the bricks were the only thing still red by morning.

The bride wouldn't have them cut. She stood among the two great heads, each the size of a fist, and said roses in grey were the only roses that never lied about their thorns. So we wove sprigs of blue delphinium through the bouquet, which at least held some colour, and walked her down the path past the wall, where the buds climbed higher than anyone remembered them climbing, like ink spilled upward.

When the vicar asked whether anyone objected, the wind lifted every petal on the wall at once, and nobody said a word. Write back soon and tell me whether the roses in Leeds have gone grey too.

Yours in dark ink, Edwin