Black tribal design with a red rose and green leaves tattooed on the upper arm, photographed close up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal and rose design on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A red rose with green leaves sits at the centre of a bold black tribal design. The tribal elements are solid black shapes with sharp, radiating points, while the rose has soft red and pink shading. The arm fills the frame, with a dark background and grey fabric at the edges.

Blackwork Traditional Upper arm Rose Tribal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had taken the outer wall of the fish market at Porthgwen, and by morning the thorn hedge Aunt Maud had planted along the sea wall was lying across the slipway like a dropped fan of black wire. Nobody wanted to touch it. My cousin Davey swore the thorns were poisoned, and Mr Pryce from the chandlery said they had grown out of the old wreck timbers, which was nonsense, but nobody argued with him.

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I went down with my knife and a pair of gloves my mother had knitted from wool that smelt of tar. The stems came away in long, stubborn ropes, and beneath them, pressed flat against the wet stones, was a single rose. It was red as a boat's signal flag and unbroken, though the sea had been over it all night. I cut it free and carried it up the hill in my cupped hands, afraid to breathe on it.

Maud was ninety-one and sat by the window with the shutters open. She looked at the rose, then at my palms, and laughed until she coughed. 'That's not from the hedge, girl. That's the one I dropped in the tide for your grandfather, the year his boat didn't come back off the Dogger bank. The thorns always know where to go.'

I put the rose in a jar of rainwater on her sill. By the next tide the black thorns had drawn a clean ring round the jar, sharp as a compass point, and not one of them touched the glass.