Traditional style tattoos of roses and flowers covering a forearm and the fingers and hands of a person wearing a white graphic t-shirt.

Traditional forearm sleeve and hand tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A person wearing a white t-shirt with a printed revolver graphic holds their hands together at the waist, showing tattoos on the forearms and fingers. The forearm tattoos include roses and other flowers in bold black outlines with grey and red accents. The fingers and hands carry smaller black lettering and line work, and the photograph is a film shot with soft natural light.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The snow shut the Hart Road on Tuesday and it is still shut, so you will have to take my word that the inn is full of stranded lorry drivers and one very cross vicar. Mrs Pargeter has given me the back room for my roses, which sounds grander than it is. They are cuttings from Grandad's wall, bundled in wet newspaper on the windowsill beside the coal scuttle, and I have been talking to them the way he did, which you would laugh at.

Yesterday the Dutch lorry man came in shaking the frost off his cap and asked what I was doing with a bucket of thorns. I told him they were for a wedding in Halifax, which is a lie, and he bought a pint on the strength of it. Then he saw the sketch I'd made on the back of the order book, a red bloom with a black outline thick as a hangman's rope, and said his mother had one just like it inked on her arm in Rotterdam. Small world, he said. It is not, Tom. It is a very large world and everyone in it wants something to last.

The cutting that matters is the one with the knuckle words. Remember Grandad spelling out PEACE and WAR on his own fingers, and telling you the choice was always yours to make in a fist? I have started doing the same with mine, in ink, the week before the snow. I'm not sure yet which word goes on the last finger. I thought you might choose.

Three days since I potted it, and this morning there was a bud the size of a barleycorn, pale green, pushing up through the frost on the glass. Mrs Pargeter says it is impossible in February. I said so is most things worth having.

Write soon, if the post gets through.

Love, Jo

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