Black and grey shaded rose with leaves and a small outlined star on a woman's forearm, with a stem running up the arm.

Shaded rose and leaves on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey rose, drawn as a full open bloom with layered petals, sits on the outer forearm with several leaves below it. A thin outlined star sits to the right of the flower, and a fine stem with leaves continues up the arm towards the elbow. The soft greyscale shading gives the petals depth, and the plain light background keeps the focus on the arm.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Peony Leaves Stem Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, you lot, the fire's only warm for the front row. No, the rose by the north wall is not the white one we cut for Lady Day. That one froze the winter the bell cracked. This one is older than the bell and older than the abbot who wanted it dug out, and it has never once been pruned by a brother's hand.

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Brother Osric was the gardener then, a man who hated waste the way other men hate draughts. The year of the great rain he grafted a bud from the wild hedge onto the old stock by the wall, working in the hour before compline with a knife he kept for nothing else. Next morning the bud had opened into a bloom as heavy as a monk's cowl, its petals folded over one another like the pages of a psalter, and beneath it the leaves were dark as slate after rain. Someone had cut a small star into the stone above the bed to mark the planting, and the star was the only thing in that garden that never faded.

The abbot came out at dusk with a mattock, meaning to have the whole bed up before the visitors arrived from the bishop's house. He raised the tool, then lowered it. The stem had climbed the wall in the night, past the star, and its newest leaves were turned towards the bell tower, reaching for the rope as if the rose wanted to ring the hours itself. The abbot stood there until the bats came out, then went back indoors without his mattock.

They say the bell has never rung flat since. Osric is long dead, and his knife lies in the crypt with him, but the rose still climbs, a hand's breadth a year, and we leave the north path clear for it. Mind your feet on the step, now. Tomorrow I'll tell you why the abbot's grave faces the wall.