Black and grey fine line rose with leaves and a thorny stem tattooed on the neck behind an ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small rose tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black and grey rose with two leaves and a long thorned stem sits on the neck just behind the ear. The linework is fine and the petals are lightly shaded to give depth. The tattoo is shown in a close, slightly angled black and white photo with a hair bow visible at the top left.

Fine line Botanical Neck Rose Stem Thorn Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 17:42 to Hereford is eleven minutes late, and you have already bought a second tea from the trolley because the first went cold on the bench under the clock. Mrs Okafor at the florist's on Chapel Row said the roses would keep until Thursday if you changed the water, so they sit wrapped in brown paper under your arm, one bloom browning at the edge, the stem poking past your elbow like a finger that wants to be noticed.

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Tom was supposed to meet you here. He wrote on the back of a parking ticket that he would be the one with the umbrella, and although it has not rained since Monday, you have checked every grey coat that came down the footbridge stairs. The board flicks over: platform four. Turning the ticket to read it again, you find a small drawn rose in the corner, done in biro while he was on the phone to his sister, its stem running off the edge of the paper.

You do the arithmetic the way you always do, counting on your fingers under the paper. Twelve years of Saturdays. The evenings you sat at the kitchen table pulling thorns from stems one at a time and pressing them into a saucer, as if taking the sharp parts off made the rest of it safe to hold.

The train sighs in and the doors slide open. You step up, then step back down, and wedge the roses upright against the bench where the next person cannot miss them. Tucked into the wrapping is the parking ticket with its little rose. The doors chime. As the carriage pulls away you watch the bench shrink behind the glass, the flowers still standing there, thorns and all, waiting for someone else to decide what they mean.