Realistic colour tattoo of three pink roses with dark green leaves across the upper arm and shoulder of a person wearing a black top.

Three pink roses on an upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Three pink and mauve roses sit in a loose cluster with dark green leaves, two of them at the top of the shoulder and one lower down the upper arm. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and bold dark outlines define their folds. The roses fill most of the frame against a pale background and a black top.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that cup, and mind the boards by the door, they've been waiting seventy years to catch somebody out. Now, you want the story of the three roses. Everybody in Ardwick knew them, though nobody knew who had grown them. Mrs Tully kept the flower stall under the arches at the Corn Exchange, and every Saturday she cut three pink roses from a bucket, bound them with green ribbon and sold them for sixpence to whichever lad was brave enough to ask a girl to the Saturday dance.

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One autumn, a sailor called Eamon Pryce came back from Liverpool with no money and a wound he never talked about. He had lost his nerve, and he had lost his cap, and he stood at the stall one evening with his hands in his pockets pretending he had come for a light. Mrs Tully looked at him the way she looked at frost on the window and said, you'll take the roses or you'll take the cold, your choice. He took the roses. He pressed them into the coat of a girl called Nora Dunne at the hall that night, and they danced until the caretaker switched the lamps off on them.

Here is the part they don't put in the parish paper. The roses lasted past the first frost, pressed flat in a book, and the dark green leaves went black at the edges like tea left too long. Eamon went back to sea. Nora kept the book on the sill of the front room, and every Saturday for years the three roses were looked at, handled, and put back, and that was the whole of the courting, and it was enough.