Black and grey shaded roses with leaves and buds tattooed across an upper arm and shoulder, worn by a person in a red and blue striped top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded roses on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of large roses in various stages of bloom, with a closed bud and several leaves, runs from the shoulder down the upper arm. The roses are rendered with soft grey shading and fine dark outlines, giving them a realistic dimension. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, set against a background of red and blue stripes.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Shoulder Rose Leaf Bud Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pink climber had got through the chapel railings again, and Mrs Hollis wanted it cut back before the Whit fete, so I went round the back of the vicarage with Dad's secateurs in my apron pocket and a cardigan I should not have worn in June. Nobody else in Market Denby grew roses that size. Dad said it was the clay. Mrs Hollis said it was the prayers. I said it was the pig muck from Pryce's farm, which made him laugh into his pipe for a full minute.

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Near the top of the wall was a bud nobody had opened in three summers, tight as a fist and blushing at the edges. Dad called it Edwin's, after the lad who planted the first cuttings in 1936 and went out to Malaya with the Gunners and never came back up the lane. I was not supposed to touch it. But the wall was leaning on the chapel side, and the stem was the thing holding the brick together, and I had my father's hands and my father's stubbornness, so I cut it.

It fell into my palm heavier than it looked. That evening I put it in a jam jar on the kitchen windowsill and watched it for a week, which Mum said was daft. On the eighth morning the petals had come loose all at once, soft and silver-grey where the light caught them, with dark leaves gathered round like people who had been waiting at the gate.

We carried the jar to the fete on the Saturday. Mrs Hollis looked at it for a long time and said nothing about the wall, only that the roses were very fine this year. Dad took his pipe out of his mouth and put it back again without lighting it, which is how I knew he had seen Edwin in it too.