Black and grey floral tattoo of a rose with buds and leaves on the inner forearm, beside a thin gold cuff bracelet.

Small floral tattoo on an inner forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cluster of flowers, featuring a central rose with petals, two closed buds and sprigs of leaves, is tattooed on the inner forearm. The design uses fine black linework with soft grey shading to give the petals depth. The arm is held against a white satin gown on a warm, softly blurred background.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Rose Flower Bud Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Lorna Vane had pinned the hem three times before the morning of the wedding, and three times the bride had said it was perfect. Edie Marsh had run the back room of the haberdashery on Harbour Street for thirty-one years, long enough to know that perfect was what people said when they were too tired to argue. She knelt on the boards with a mouthful of pins and listened to the tide working at the harbour wall.

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Her mother had kept a grey-leafed rose by the back step, a stubborn thing that flowered in June only if nobody fussed over it. The silk buds Edie had stitched across the bodice came from that bush, worked in thread the colour of wet slate so they would not shout across the marquee. The bride's sister had asked for something louder. Edie told her that roses in the rain looked best when they were a little bit sulky.

On Saturday the gown went off in a taxi, and Edie stayed behind to sweep the cuttings from under the table. She found one loose bud, no bigger than a thumbnail, lodged in the grain of the floorboards. She wiped it on her apron and sat for a while with it in her palm, thinking about the rose by the back step, which somebody had dug out for a patio the year after her mother died.

Before she locked up she took a needle and a scrap of grey silk from the drawer and stitched the bud inside the hem of her own cardigan, where nobody would ever look. Then she turned off the lamp and walked home along the harbour road.