Black and grey tattoo of two shaded roses with outlined petals on a shoulder, beside a dark top and a light fabric edge.

Two roses on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two rose heads tattooed across the top of a shoulder, one higher and one lower, with the lower rose partly overlapping the upper arm. The petals are drawn in fine dark outlines with soft grey shading that gives the blooms depth. The image is a phone screenshot with a browser interface around it, and the tattoo sits against warm, dim skin with a dark garment at the left and a pale fabric at the right.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways into the stalls since four, and Nell Harrower had given up trying to keep the buckets dry. She stood under the tin awning at Saltergate market with water beading on her coat and watched Mr Okafor's van reverse up the cobbles, its back doors already open. Forty stems of Dutch roses, the good ones, cut a little too early so they would have to be coaxed open.

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Her father had grown roses in the glasshouse behind Holloway Lane, and he had taught her to read them the way other people read faces. The outer petals bruised first, the heart stayed tight as a fist. 'Look past the colour,' he'd said. 'Look at the shadow where the petal folds.' She had carried that lesson for years without knowing what to do with it. Now she sorted the blooms into two buckets, the open ones and the reluctant ones, and sold the reluctant ones cheap to the hospital porters who came in for their wives.

By noon the rain had thinned to a fine grey hush and the awning dripped in a steady rhythm. A man in a wet wax jacket stopped at the stall and asked for two roses, one for his mother and one for a sister he had not spoken to since the funeral. Nell wrapped them in brown paper and didn't ask which was which. She noticed how he held them, one a little higher than the other, as if he could not decide which to hand over first.

When he had gone, she found a petal had come loose from the lower rose and fallen into the bucket. She pressed it between two pages of the day's ledger, and by closing time it had dried to the colour of pencil, which was exactly how her father used to draw them.