Two painterly rose tattoos, one red and one blue-grey, on the backs of a pair of calves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two rose tattoos on the calves

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two large roses sit on the back of each calf, the left in reds and pinks and the right in blue-grey tones. Loose, sketchy black linework and soft blended washes give a painterly finish, with dark stems and green-grey leaves. The photo is taken from behind on a pavement, with white and coral trainers visible at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Calf Rose Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses came up through the yard wall the spring after Dad's boat was sold, one red as a pillar box, one the colour of pewter. My sister Ruth said the red one was the good one and I should stop watering the grey, which only looked dead because it was thirsty. We had eleven rooms to let at Harbour View and nobody wanted to talk about money at breakfast, so we talked about roses instead.

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Ruth painted the pair of them onto the back of the scullery door that summer, with gouache she'd bought off a man selling ends of lines at the Saturday market. She worked fast and loose, dragging the black strokes down the stems like she was impatient with them. I told her the grey one looked drowned. She said it looked like weather. Mr Okonedo in room four said it looked like a bruise that had decided to bloom, and he paid his rent in full that week, which we took as a verdict.

The frost came in November and took the red rose down to the root. The grey one stood up through it, its leaves gone silver at the edges, and by February it was the only thing in the yard that had not given up. Ruth stood at the back step with her hands pushed into her cardigan and said nothing for a long while.

When guests asked which rose was ours, I pointed at the grey one and let them think it was the sad one. Ruth never corrected me. The door still hangs in the scullery, the red on it faded to salmon, the blue-grey holding.