Three side-by-side photographs of a black and grey traditional rose tattoo on the inner wrist and forearm, each shown at a slightly different angle.

Three black and grey roses on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three black and white panels show the same traditional rose design on the inner wrist and lower forearm, each in a different position. The rose has bold black outlines, solid shading on the petals and leaves, and white highlights along the petal edges. The arms are cropped against a dark background, with the tattoo placed centrally in each frame.

Traditional Forearm Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lane to Carrow Fold by Tuesday, so Mrs Pell counted the coal scuttle twice and pinned the old flash sheet back up behind the bar where the lamp could reach it. Her late brother had drawn those roses in a back room in Hull, thick black outlines and petals shaded solid, the white left bare along each edge like light caught on a spoon. Nobody in the valley had ever asked for one. Then Ewan Cray came in off the moor with a fiddle case strapped to his back and asked whether she still had the rose.

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He sat by the range while she traced the design onto carbon paper, and he kept turning his hand over as though checking it for weather. Three times he had her stencil it, and three times he laughed and wiped the ink away with his thumb. "Lower," he said at first, then, "no, higher," and finally, when the snow stopped and the light came in pale across the flagstones, "somewhere I can see it while I play." She set the leaves so their serrated tips pointed the way a bow would travel.

By the Thursday the road was ploughed. Ewan paid for his coffee and not the ink, and left his fiddle leaning against the settle as if he meant to come back for it. Mrs Pell found the stencil on the floor, its outline smudged into three faint roses, one laid over the next, each a little further up the paper.

She pinned it beside the flash, next to the sheet of roses her brother had never finished, and the bare white petals caught the lamplight.