Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses with leaves running down the inner forearm, shown against a wooden wall.

Two roses and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two open roses are drawn in fine linework, with a third rose partly visible below them and several leaves filling the gaps. The petals and leaves are shaded with fine stippling and hatching that gives them depth. The design wraps diagonally down the forearm, and a beaded bracelet sits on the wrist against a grey wooden background.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still now, and mind the wasps, they're at the windfalls again. Leave the bucket be. I'll come to the roses directly, for you can't have roses without the wall they climb, and the wall at Ashcombe was older than any tree in the orchard.

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Old Edwin Pruett had three trees left that August and a debt to Mr Carrow that the apples could never pay. Carrow wanted the land for a sawmill. Every evening Edwin walked the rows with his shears, and every evening he stopped at the crumbling wall where a red rose had grown wild for sixty years, thick as a man's wrist, and cut nothing from it.

The reckoning came on the last Saturday of the month. Carrow arrived with his surveyor's chain and his lawyer's cough, and found the wall in full bloom, the blooms gone open and blowsy in the heat, every bee in the county drunk on them. The surveyor asked why a man would keep a thicket of thorns when the fruit was going to rot on the bough anyway. Edwin only said his mother had planted that rose with her own hands, and it would be the last thing he ever sold. Carrow pricked his thumb on a stem, swore, and rode off up the lane without another word.

So the mill went up on the far side of the valley, and the orchard went to brambles, and the wall still stands. Go up Ashcombe lane next August and you'll find roses on it, opening in the dusk like they've something to say to nobody at all. Now fetch me that cup of cider, and mind the wasps.