Small outlined red rose tattoo with a black stem and leaf on the back, in a botanical style.

Small red rose with black stem

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A small rose in red ink with a bold black outline sits at the top of a black stem that curves downward, with a single black leaf to the left. The petals are filled with solid red and shaped as simple overlapping curves, with little shading. The tattoo is centred on plain, lightly lit skin with a soft background.

Botanical Back Rose Stem Leaf Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Majestic Ballroom in Hull had ever seen Mr Pryce hand a rose to anybody, so when he pressed one into my hand at the interval I assumed it was a joke about my trumpet. It was a single red bloom with a stem cut too short and a leaf already curling at the edge. He told me to give it to the girl in the green dress by the cloakroom, then went back to his cigarette and would not meet my eye.

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The girl in green was Marjorie Fenn, who ran the cloakroom with a ledger and no patience. I held the rose out. She looked at it the way you look at a bill you already know the amount of. "He does this every Friday," she said. "Since the coronation. A rose, and every Friday I have to decide whether to be insulted." She took it anyway and turned the stem between finger and thumb. The thorns had been stripped with a penknife, neat as a comb.

We danced once that night, during the last waltz, when the lights went amber and the band played slower than it should. She told me the rose was a habit from her husband, who had been dead six winters, and that Pryce had kept the habit going ever since, buying a fresh one from the market each week because he could not stand to see one wither in a drawer. I did not know what to say, so I said my trumpet was out of tune.

On the Monday after, when the hall was swept and the chairs stacked, I found the cloakroom ticket still in her drawer, numbered forty-one, with the rose pressed flat between its pages. The red had gone the colour of a plum stain, and the stem had dried into a single dark curve, as if it had been bending towards something all along.