Pink and grey rose tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with a dotwork flower behind the roses and a banner reading Fearless below.

Two roses and a dotwork flower on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two large open roses sit on the upper arm, with a second rose lower down and a dotwork flower behind the upper bloom. The petals are shaded in soft reds and pinks with grey and black detailing and bold outlines. A ribbon banner with the script word Fearless curls beneath the lower rose, and the photo is taken outdoors with a white dress visible at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Flower Mandala Banner Script Fearless

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grafting knife is still tacky with sap when Dorrie passes it to you over the low wall of the old glasshouse. "Slant the cut away from you," she says, "or you'll bleed on the stock and it won't take." Behind her the orchard slopes down towards the river in rows of russet and Bramley, and in late August the wasps are drunk on the windfalls. Her roses have climbed the brick in a tangle nobody has pruned since Ted died, and the ones she wants are the deep blush ones with the dotted hips.

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Your first cut is too shallow. She doesn't scold. She binds the union with strips of old cotton sheet and tells you a rose will forgive a clumsy hand if the green lines up under the bark. Over the wall the church clock strikes four. A boy on a bicycle rattles past shouting about the tombola at the fête. Pinned to the glasshouse door is a seed packet gone soft at the corners, and on it, in Ted's square capitals, someone has written FEARLESS, the name he gave a variety he bred and never registered.

"The little flower behind the big bloom is his doing too," Dorrie says, tapping the air where a mandala would sit. "He drew those seed heads in the margins of every catalogue we ever got, round and round until the paper went grey." She wraps the stem in wet newspaper and presses it into your hands. "Plant it where the medlar shades the wall. Roses want to feel the sun go off them before they're ready."

You walk the cutting down between the trees as the light goes orange and the wasps finally give up. When you look back the glasshouse has gone dark, but the porch light is already on, and a mug of tea sits cooling on the step with a biscuit balanced on the saucer, as if she always knew you would come back up the path.