Black and grey shaded rose tattoo on the upper chest near the collarbone, with the wearer in a blue off-shoulder top.

Shaded rose on upper chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose with layered, curling petals and a few leaves sits on the upper chest, close to the collarbone and shoulder. The petals are rendered with soft grey shading, dark outlines and highlights that give the flower a three-dimensional look. The background is a plain wall and a blue marl top, and the photo is cropped so that the face is not shown.

Realism Botanical Chest Rose Flower Petal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penrose broke the ice on the trough before light, because the cows would not drink from a skin of it and her father had not been able to stand since Michaelmas. The yard was grey with rime. Beyond the hedge the fields lay flat and pale, and the only dark thing left was the rose climbing the north wall of the barn, which her grandmother had planted the spring she married and which nobody had pruned since.

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Her father said the rose had a bargain in it. Every winter it lost its leaves, and every winter, when the first hard frost came, it put out one bloom, grey as slate, its petals folded over petals like cabbage leaves in the dark. "Cut it and bring it in," he told her, "and the cold stays outside the house until it wilts." She had never believed him, but she had never tested it either.

That morning the bloom was there, tight and heavy, its edges curled as if a thumb had pressed them. Ada cut it with the sheep shears, carried it through the scullery, and set it in a jug beside the range. By noon the kitchen had lost the damp that had sat in its corners for weeks. The kettle sang. Her father, propped in his chair, watched the petals loosen one at a time and said nothing.

By evening the snow had stopped and the bloom was brown at the rim. In the morning there was a new bud on the barn wall, hard and closed, and Ada stood in the yard with the shears in her hand, looking at it for a long while. Then she went in, took the family Bible from the shelf, and pressed one dry petal between the pages beside the year.