Black fine line single-line tattoo of a rose on the upper arm, set against a vintage botanical plate background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single line rose on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A continuous single-line drawing of a rose or tulip bloom with a curved stem sits on the upper arm. The thin black outline has no shading or fill, and the open composition leaves the skin visible around it. The ink is black on pale skin, with a dark vintage botanical print and a grey sleeve behind the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The porter at Hollin Cross had been told a hundred times that the rose on the east platform was a weed, and a hundred times he had let it stand. It grew in the crack where the old down line met the concrete, and it bloomed without asking anybody's leave. Nobody had planted it. The signalmen said it came up the week the last engine was hauled off to the breakers, and that its stem ran the colour of rust on the points.

Keep reading

Bet Ansell, the signalman's daughter, could draw anything without lifting her pencil. Her father liked to watch her do it on the backs of old timetables. She sat at the window of the box one wet October and traced the rose in one unbroken line, down the stem, round the open cup of the petals, and back to where she had started. When she finished, the bloom on the platform had turned its face towards the box, as if it had heard its name.

The night the 4.10 ran through without stopping, a woman stood on the bench with a suitcase and no ticket. The rose opened wide and bent its stem across the rails, and the points shifted by themselves. Bet put her hand on the lever and held it. The train came in on the line that was never drawn, took the woman aboard, and pulled away with the rose still nodding at the window.

Bet kept the timetable. On the back of it one line ran from the box to the platform without a break, and no matter how hard her father rubbed at it with his thumb, it would not come off the paper.

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