Black and grey tattoo of three roses with shaded leaves across the shoulder and upper arm.

Three roses on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of three roses with outlined petals and soft grey shading sits across the shoulder and upper arm, with dark leaves beneath the blooms. Fine linework defines the petal edges, while the grey wash gives the flowers depth against the skin. The composition is tightly grouped, with the largest rose at the top and the others layered below it. Faint script runs down the upper chest to the left of the design.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had counted the petals on the third rose twice before the band started up again, and the number was still wrong. Nine, she thought, or eleven if the one curled underneath counted. Her mother's stall at the back of the Palais sold them by the bunch for a shilling, grey-green stems wrapped in brown paper, and the dancers bought them to pin to their lapels or carry out to the cold car park when they had nothing left to say to each other.

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Frank came over from the bandstand with his collar undone, which meant he had been sweating through the foxtrot and not enjoying it. He stopped at the stall and held out a sixpence. "Three," he said. "The big ones with the dark leaves."

She wrapped them with more care than the paper deserved, knotting the stems with string, and when she handed them over he didn't take them straight away. He looked at the cluster as though it might come apart in his hands. "Who are they for?" she asked. "Somebody who's waited long enough," he said, and tucked them under his arm, the blooms shaded grey in the lamplight like pencil studies of themselves, and went back across the sprung floor towards the doors.

At closing, when the lights were dimmed and her mother was stacking chairs, Ada found a torn scrap of brown paper caught under the stall's edge. On it, in soft pencil, someone had written Tuesday, and underneath that, smaller, Ada, if you're free. She folded the scrap into her apron pocket with the sixpence, and on Tuesday she was free.