Black and grey realism tattoo of two roses with a ribbon-like swirl and a small butterfly on an upper arm.

Two realistic roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two large roses sit on a swirling ribbon-like band that runs down the arm, with a smaller butterfly visible near the top edge. The petals show detailed, smooth shading with fine highlights and small water droplets on the upper rose. The image is in black and grey on a dark background, with the composition focused on the tattoo.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Rose Butterfly Leaves Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every January the beck above Low Scarrow froze hard enough for the ewes to cross it, and every January old Hannah Pell tied a length of blue ribbon to the gatepost so the carrier would know the track was open. The winter her son went south to the mills, she tied the ribbon and forgot to untie it, and by March it had gone grey with weather.

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The carrier, a silent man called Dunstan, came up with the coal on the first thaw and found the ribbon not rotted but gone. In its place a rose was growing out of the mud at the foot of the post. It was no kind of rose he knew. The petals were the colour of wet slate, and each one held a drop of water that did not run off when he tilted it. He cut a stem to take home, and it bled a thin clear sap onto his glove.

Hannah watched him turn the stem in his fingers and said nothing for a long while. Then she told him that a rose will come up where a promise was kept badly, and that the trick was to leave the ribbon where it lay and let the ground decide. Dunstan said that was nonsense. She poured him tea anyway, and he drank it, and the next January he came up the track with a length of his own blue ribbon and tied it beside hers.

By the following spring there were two roses at the gatepost and a third bud with frost still on it. The ewes crossed the beck every winter after, and none of them ever looked down at the ground beneath their feet.