Black and grey traditional tattoo of two roses with buds and leaves on the upper arm.

Two roses and buds on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two open roses on a vertical stem, with two smaller buds and several pointed leaves branching above and below them. Bold dark outlines define the petals and leaves, and the shading is built up with fine stippled dots within the petals. The design is in black ink on a light-skinned upper arm, with a plain pale garment and a blurred pale background framing it.

Traditional Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Rose Rose bud Leaf Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had the ovens going by four, and the dough was already proving under damp cloths when Ruth came in through the back, shaking rain off a coat that smelled of the night bus. "Tell me you've left me the good tin," she said. Marta had not. She had left her the cake instead, a three-tier thing for a christening in Walthamstow, still bare on the steel bench, its top tier ringed with pale buttercream roses she had piped the night before and hated.

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Ruth set down her bag and picked up the piping bag without asking. Her hands were quicker than Marta's and steadier at this hour. She worked each petal with the nozzle turned flat, lifting and folding, then came back with a fine tip and dotted the centres, a crowd of tiny stipples that made the roses look as if they had been breathed on. "Your mistake," she said, "is you keep trying to make them open. Leave a few shut. Nobody's gran had a fully open rose at a christening."

They worked while the window turned from black to the colour of weak tea. A milk float rattled past the yard gate. Marta thought about her mother, who had kept a rose bush by the coal bunker and never once cut it for the house, and whose funeral had been in March. She did not say so. She slid the second tier onto the board and let Ruth add a bud at the base, where a stem would climb.

At ten past six the first delivery van swung its lights across the yard. Ruth stood back, wiped her thumb on her apron and said the cake looked grown rather than made. Marta laughed, the first real laugh of the morning, and carried the box out to the van herself, leaving the roses to set in the cold.