Colour tattoo of two pink roses with green leaves and stems wrapping across the inner forearm, shown on a black chair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two pink roses with leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two pink roses with shaded petals sit on the forearm, linked by green stems, small leaves and a few buds. The petals use soft gradients of pink and red with darker shading at the centres, and the leaves are rendered in layered greens. The arm rests on a black padded chair against a wooden floor, with the tattoo placed near the wrist.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Stem Bud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The galley smells of onions and wet wool this morning, and the jam jar on the shelf above the range is full of roses again. I took the cutting from the bosun's window box in Grimsby the week before we sailed, wrapped in a damp tea towel like contraband. Harker says roses at sea are bad luck, that no man has ever come home from a voyage with a rose in his coat, but he eats his bacon in the galley with his back to them all the same.

The weather came on the third night off the Dogger. Every pan on its hook swung like a pendulum, the jar went over, and I was on my knees with a mop when I saw the stem had snapped clean. I thought that was the end of it. But the cutting had put out two shoots from the bottom of the stalk, and by the time we raised the Humber both were in bud, pink at the edges like something freshly scalded, the lower one already opening over the drip tray.

We tied up on Tuesday. I did not tell Harker what I meant to do, which was to carry the two roses up to the chapel by the old fish quay and ask the verger whether anyone would plant them. He said he would. I stood there with the water running off my sleeve and thought of you, who always wanted a garden and never had one, and then I came straight back to write this, so you would know there is a rose growing in the cracks of the harbour wall with your name on it. Two of them, if the gulls leave them be.

Yours, Ada