Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing red roses, two round picture frames and a banner reading There is no place like home.

Roses and frames with a home banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo of two red roses and green leaves framing two round picture frames and two scrolling banners. The banners read 'There is no place like home', and the left frame holds a sepia landscape of a house with trees. Bold outlines and soft shading give the design depth, with warm reds, greens and golden browns set against a grey and black backdrop.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Rose Leaves Banner Landscape House Tree Quote Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in closer, under the awning, because the rain's come sideways off the river again and I'll not shout over it. Forty years I've had this pitch by the fish stalls, and in all that time there was one man who came every Saturday in March to buy old frames, and never once bought a picture to go in them.

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His name was Desmond Achter, a quiet fellow with a brass watch that ran slow. He bought two round frames from me the spring his mother died, the gilt rubbed to a shine on the rims, and asked if I had any photographs of houses. I had a tin of them, most nobody wanted. He went through them with his cold fingers until he found a farmhouse with two poplars and a track running off into nothing, the paper gone the colour of weak tea.

He put that picture in the left frame and left the right one bare. I asked him why. He said it was for his sister, who'd write one day to say she was coming home. Every Saturday after, he bought a rose from the flower woman three stalls down and pushed the stem through the gap in the brass, like a man leaving the porch light on.

The sister never wrote. Then one wet Saturday a woman in a green coat stopped at my stall and asked, without a word, for a frame the size of his. I gave her the spare. She turned it over, read the pencilled line on the back, and walked off under the umbrellas. I never learned what it said. But Desmond's last rose is still in the jar on my table, gone brown at the petals, and I've never had the heart to throw it out.