Black and grey realism tattoo of two roses with leaves on a person's forearm, photographed indoors on a wooden floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two black and grey roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two full-bloom roses with shaded petals and dark leaves wrap across the outer forearm, with a smaller bud partly visible beneath them. The linework is soft and the shading builds strong contrast and depth across the petals, with grey wash and solid black in the leaves. The photo is taken at a slight angle, showing the arm from elbow to wrist against a white shirt, jeans and a wooden floor.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Rose bud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the crisps on the carpet, because Mrs Hatherley's rose bed is the part of this I've never told sober. Forty-one years ago this October, Dennis Pratt went over the chain-link at the back of Ashfield Comprehensive with a bread knife in one hand and a feed sack in the other, and he came back with two cuttings from the bed the caretaker swore would be dead by Easter.

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They were grey roses, not red, because the bed had been planted by a man who'd come home from the Somme and wanted something that wouldn't show the soot from the boiler house. Dennis kept the cuttings in a jam jar on the windowsill of the chemistry lab for a week, topping up the water whenever Miss Okonedo turned her back to the board. Nobody believed they would take. The little bud, tucked low beneath the other two, was the only thing that came up in March without a fuss, and Dennis said that was the one to watch.

Then came the turn I promised you. He left before the summer exams, went off to Hull to work on the trawlers, and the last we heard he was at sea and writing to nobody. Last month his daughter turned up here in his place with a folded napkin, and on it a drawing he'd asked a man in a shop by the docks to make from memory: two full-blown roses, shaded dark where the leaves cut across them, and that same small bud peeping out beneath. She said he'd wanted the school kept somewhere he could carry it.

So I'll ask you to lift your glasses to Dennis Pratt, who never came back over that fence, and to the little bud that did.