Colour tattoo on a forearm of pink roses and green leaves with black outlines, wrapped by a ribbon banner carrying lettering, in a neo-traditional style.

Roses and ribbon banner on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo of several pink and salmon roses with green leaves, all drawn with bold black outlines. A ribbon banner spirals down the arm through the flowers, carrying short lines of lettering. The shading is flat and solid, and the pink and green colours stand out against the skin, with the design filling most of the forearm.

Neo-trad Traditional Lettering Forearm Rose Leaf Ribbon Banner Lettering Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ivy Penhallow had bred the salmon rose for eleven years before she let anyone else touch the cuttings. Her nephew Dougie, who drove the van and fancied himself a poet, called it the spiral rose because its canes wound up the trellis in a twist, like a barber's pole that had lost its nerve. Nobody believed it would survive a Weald frost. Nobody but Ivy.

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On the morning of the County Show she came down the lane with a wet sack and a chipped enamel mug of tea and found Dougie perched on the gate with a length of pink silk across his knees. He had stitched words along it in red thread, half of them backwards from working on the wrong side of the cloth. "Live the glory," he read, squinting. "Of our cross. Hearts." He shrugged. "Sounded like a bet to me."

"It is a bet," Ivy said, and untied the sack. Inside, the roses had opened in the night, pink as the inside of a shell, petals stiff with dew. Thirty years ago she had wagered the vicar's wife a pound that a rose could be coaxed up a dead ash and flower on the sunny side of the hedge. The vicar's wife was long dead, and the pound had been spent on liniment, but the wager still held.

Dougie wound the silk round the fence post, letter after letter, until the words lay in a spiral down the wood. Ivy set the cutting at its foot and pressed the soil flat with her thumb. By noon the first bloom had climbed past the last stitch, and the last word, hearts, showed bare and bright above the leaves, as if the rose had finally decided to read it aloud.