Black and grey shaded rose tattoo with leaves on the top of a foot, resting on white bedsheets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded rose on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on white bedsheets with a black garment at the ankle. A cluster of shaded roses with outlined petals and leaves sits on the top of the foot. The soft grey shading and fine linework are set against warm skin and pale fabric.

Realism Botanical Other Rose Leaves Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses came up from Holland in the back of a lorry that smelled of diesel and cold water, and by two in the morning Mo had them sorted into buckets on the concrete floor of the Smithfield annexe. Nobody bought roses at that hour. The florists came later in vans with their hazards blinking, but Mo liked the quiet before them, when the strip lights hummed and the only other sound was Bertie's radio stuck on a phone-in about the football.

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The bad stems always went to the end of the row. Bertie called them the grey ones, because the outer petals browned and then went the colour of old dishwater, and there was no call for them once the morning crowd arrived. Every night Mo took one for his coat pocket, the way his mother used to keep a biro in hers. She had drawn roses on the backs of gas bills and shaded them with her thumb until the paper went soft. He had never asked her why roses. She had never offered a reason.

At half five a woman came in off Charterhouse Street with a sketchbook under her arm and rain in her hair. She wanted one stem, any stem, for a sister's birthday she had forgotten until the previous evening. Mo gave her the grey one without thinking, then felt foolish, then didn't. She turned it over in the light, traced the petals with a fingertip, and tore a page from the sketchbook. On it she had drawn the same rose, shaded so finely that the edges seemed to lift off the paper. She folded it twice and put it in his hand instead of money.

He still has it, folded in his wallet beside the receipts. It is the first thing anyone ever paid him in pencil, and it smells faintly of the Dutch cold store, which is to say of nothing at all.