Colour tattoo sleeve of roses and leaves on the upper arm and forearm of a woman in a grey graphic t-shirt.

Roses and leaves on a sleeve tattoo

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with long red hair wears a grey t-shirt printed with glasses and the words TRUST ME I'M A GEEK, and her arm is visible at the left edge of the frame. The tattoo covers the upper arm and forearm with a large red rose at the top, green leaves and a further ornamental floral element below, shaded in full colour. The shot is a front-facing studio photograph with a plain white background, with the tattoo as a secondary detail beside the shirt print.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Rose Leaves Floral Sleeve Woman T-shirt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad said a rose wants three things: sun it can't have, water it won't take, and a man who talks to it when the pit has taken all his talking. Our allotment sat on the slag side of Hollin Row, where the soil was more coal dust than loam, so every bloom was a small argument won against the colliery.

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The summer I was fourteen, Mr Teale from number nine bet Dad a week of back shifts that his Crimson Glory would beat ours at the gala show. Dad took the bet without looking up from his pipe. We spent June feeding the bed with bone meal and stewed tea leaves, and I learned to tie the canes with the same knot Dad used on the pit props, because he said a thing held right will hold anything.

On the Friday before the show, the lamp-room lad came running up the lane to say Teale's bush had been stripped in the night, every head snapped off at the stem. Dad said nothing. He went out to the back of his own plot, cut the best bloom he had, red as a gas flare, and walked it up to Teale's door with the dew still on it.

Teale opened the door in his vest and stared at the rose, then at Dad, then he took it without a word. On Saturday there were two red heads on the trestle table at the show, side by side, and the judge gave the cup to neither of us, which Dad said was the only fair decision anyone had made in Hollin Row that year. I still have the petals from that day pressed flat in my copy of the pit rules, brown now and light as ash.