Black and grey botanical tattoo on the outer forearm showing roses, peony buds, leaves and film strips with a dotted arc above.

Roses, peonies and film strips on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the forearm, with large roses and peony blooms at the base and smaller buds and leaves rising toward the top. Woven between the flowers are two strips of film with sprocket holes, and a fine dotted arc curves across the upper right of the design. The work uses dense stippling and hatched shading for depth, set against plain pale skin and a white wall.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Rose Peony Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The film snapped in the gate of the number two box with a sound like a sheet being torn, and Walter Dunn said a word his mother would have washed out of him. Forty children were stamping in the stalls below, a vicar's wife was tapping her umbrella against the aisle, and the newsreel had come apart at the one place he could never see without his spectacles.

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He threaded the splice by feel, scraping the emulsion back with a razor the way his father had taught him on the Humber tugs, then laid the two ends on the cutting block and ran a line of cement along them. The sprocket holes slid past his thumb in a neat dotted line, each one exactly where it should be. Through the little window he watched the screen come up grey and grainy, a walled garden in Yorkshire where roses and peonies had been filmed for a flower show in 1938, the heavy heads bowing on their stems.

The children cheered when the blooms opened on the screen. Walter did not. He was thinking of the gardener's wife who had walked those paths humming, and of the reel that had passed through a hundred projectors since, each one wearing away a little more of her. When the lights came up he carried the spoiled length home in his jacket pocket, and at the kitchen table he held a single frame up to the lamp, the clearest bloom he could find, and cut it free with the scissors Iris used for her paper dolls.

He pinned it above the sink, beside the calendar from the Regal, where it caught the morning light. Iris saw it there when she came down with the peonies from the allotment, still tight in their wrapping, and she asked him who the lady in the garden was. Walter told her the truth, which was that he had never once learned her name.