Black and grey realistic rose tattoos on a forearm, with a woman wearing denim shorts and a brown leather belt beside her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two rose tattoos are shown on the outer arm, one higher near the upper arm and one lower towards the wrist, with the lower rose partly obscured by the hand. The roses are rendered in black and grey with soft shading on the petals and leaves and defined outlines. The photograph is taken outdoors in daylight, with the arm, belt, denim shorts and black bag filling the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second rose had started to fade before the Marigold cleared the bar at Whitby, though nobody aboard had cut it. Old Tobias Heald had carved both into the lid of his sea chest the winter before, one near the hinge and one by the brass lock, and he said roses wilted when they were carried away from the ground that fed them. The mate laughed at that. He stopped laughing when the wind swung into the north-east and stayed there for nine weeks.

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They ran south past the Dogger and round the Cape with the water casks going green and the biscuit grey with weevils. Each evening Heald sat with the chest on his knees, rubbed the pale wood with a rag and a little lamp oil, and watched the lower rose fold its petals inward like a closed hand. The cook offered to scrape it clean. Heald told him to leave the carving be, because a thing that is still being looked at is not finished yet.

On the ninety-first day a fishing smack drifted alongside, its nets heavy with weed and not a soul aboard. Heald went across for the bread and the water and found, under a thwart, a clay pot holding a single rose cutting, two small leaves and a bud no bigger than a barleycorn. Pinned beneath it was a scrap of sailcloth with a message in a stranger's hand: plant it where the wind stops.

The wind dropped the morning they sighted the Humber, and Heald carried the pot home inside his coat. He set the cutting in his daughter's yard, out of the salt, and in June it opened a single pink bloom. He never cut the carved roses down, though. He oiled them each Sunday, the way he had on the long dark passage, and let the living one do the blooming.