Two black and grey traditional roses with leaves, one on each upper chest near the shoulders, on a person wearing a black off-shoulder top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin black and grey roses on the collarbones

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a close crop of a person's upper chest and shoulders, with the face and head out of frame, and two matching rose tattoos placed symmetrically on each side of the collarbone. Each rose has bold outlines, layered petals with grey shading and surrounding leaves and small curling accents. The tattoos are rendered entirely in black and grey ink against pale skin, and the background shows a plain wall and a studio setting.

Traditional Botanical Shoulder Chest Rose Leaf Collarbone Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hydroponics bay on the Thessaly had been losing light for eleven years, and by the time the lamps went amber I had already decided which of the two roses would have to go. Mother Sable's cultivar was hardier, bred for the cold rooms. The other was older, a dark-petalled stock somebody's grandmother had carried aboard in a sealed jar, and it smelled of rain on a street none of us would ever see.

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I had the steady hand, so recording them fell to me. The cameras had died two decades back, so I used the pen-and-wash kit from the medical stores and a pot of iron-gall ink that had outlasted three captains. I sat with the cuttings on a tray under one good lamp and drew each twice, once from the north and once from the south, because one side had folded in on itself and I wanted the record to show that too.

The first drawings were ugly. My outlines wandered and the shading pooled in the creases of the leaves. Then I stopped trying to make them pretty and simply followed the shadow, leaf by leaf, grey laid over grey until each bloom looked like it was thinking about opening. Side by side, the two sheets were almost cruel in their symmetry, the same curl of stem on each, as if one bud had been split down the middle and handed to two people.

The council voted to keep the hardy stock and send the dark one to the cold vault as seed only. I sent the drawings down with the seeds anyway, sealed in the same tin, with a slip of paper that said: whoever plants these, plant the picture beside them so they know what they looked like. Last I heard, the vault clerk had pinned both roses to the lid.