Colour tattoo on the inner upper arm of black shaded script lettering with green leaves, a large realistic red rose and a smaller rosebud.

Script lettering with roses on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a shaded black script word with a flourished underline, set between green leaves and a large red rose on the right. A smaller rosebud sits at the left edge, and soft blue and purple shading sits behind the rose. The lettering uses dark greyscale shading while the flowers are rendered in red, pink and green, all shown on an upper arm photographed at a slight angle.

Lettering Realism Upper arm Script Lettering Rose Rosebud Leaves Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on the Thursday market since before dawn, so the stallholders kept their awnings low and their hands in their pockets. Mrs Ahlberg's roses were the only thing on the square that refused to look wet. She sold them from a zinc bucket beside the fishmonger's, one red bloom at a time, and she never once let the price rise when the weather turned.

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A boy came by each morning with coins he had counted twice. He wanted a rosebud, the smallest in the bucket, and every day she gave him one and told him to bring it back when it opened. He never did. He kept it inside his coat, he said, where it could drink in the damp.

In March the rain did not stop for nine days. The square flooded to the ankle and the bucket went over. When the water finally drained away, Mrs Ahlberg found a single bud pressed flat against the cobbles under the fishmonger's sign, its green sepals still bright. On the wet slate beside it someone had scratched a word with a door key, long and looping, with a swirl underneath like a wave curling back on itself. She stood reading it until the lamps came on.

She never learnt who had written it. But the following Thursday she set the largest rose she had at the foot of that sign, and the rain fell on it all day, and by evening it was still there, open and dark red against the stone.