Colour tattoo of three blue roses with green leaves and black scrollwork on the side of the ribs, shaded in grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three blue roses with scrollwork on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three blue roses on green stems and leaves, with black swirling scroll linework below and between them. Grey shading sits behind the scrolls and flowers, giving the design depth against the skin. The roses are coloured in shades of blue with green leaf detail, and the composition rises diagonally across the body from the lower left to the upper right.

Botanical Ribs Rose Leaves Stem Scroll Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blue roses had been Mrs Ferrier's idea, painted on the lid of a tin that once held Cadbury's, and every spring she set them on the windowsill of Number Nine so the sea wind could find them. Nobody on Marrow Terrace had ever seen a blue rose growing. Mr Dacre, who ran the boarding house with a ledger and a bad knee, said they were a lie the Dutch had invented to sell bulbs.

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In April the lodger in the attic room asked Mrs Ferrier whether the flowers were real. She said they were paper, cut from a seed catalogue and glued to wire, but that the stems had been cut from the hedge behind the chapel, and that the chapel hedge had never once bloomed blue. The lodger laughed and said she was lying, and Mrs Ferrier, who had been lying to the lodgers for thirty years about small things, let the matter stand.

On the night the tide came over the sea wall, Mr Dacre went up to the attic with a candle and found the window open and the tin empty, the lid lying face down on the floorboards. The stems had been tied with black thread, neatly, in a tight loop. Below the lid, in pencil on the lino, someone had drawn a set of spirals that curled back into themselves like the ends of a ribbon being unwound.

He stood a long while looking at them. Then he went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on, because the hedge behind the chapel was in full bloom at last, and he had to tell Mrs Ferrier before the morning post came.