Woman in a white lace dress with black and grey botanical tattoos of roses and leaves on her upper arm, shoulder and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and foliage tattoos on arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white lace dress sits outdoors with her head cropped out of the frame, showing several tattoos. A shaded rose with leaves covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a second floral design with leaves on the upper arm nearer the elbow and a small rose on the forearm near the wrist. The linework and grey shading are soft and the composition is close and natural, with a gold cross necklace visible at the top of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad grew roses the way the men on our row kept whippets, in secret and with a great deal of talk about soil. Every spring he walked the allotments behind the colliery wall with a bucket of ash from the heap, and every spring the blooms came up grey at the edges, dusted by the winding gear that ran all night above the village. He never apologised for it. He said coal was only sunlight that had been kept too long.

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The autumn the strike ended, the Hollin lads set up a trestle table in the institute hall for the show, and Dad entered one bloom in a class he had invented for himself. The judges laughed at it. Mr Ferris, who had worked the face beside him for twenty years and never once said a kind word about flowers, stood a long time in front of the jam jar with his cap in his hands. Then he asked what it would take to buy a cutting, and Dad said a pint and a promise to come and look at the thing when it flowered.

The cutting went into Ferris's yard on Fenton Terrace that winter, wrapped in a wet newspaper inside a Sunday shoebox. It took two years to bloom. When it did, Ferris sent word down the row, and Dad walked up with his bucket and his ash and stood beside him at the wall. Neither of them said much. The petals were the colour of a wet slate roof, with a red edge that only showed in the morning.