Black and grey roses with leaves in a traditional style, tattooed on a person's upper arm beside a grey t-shirt sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two roses with outlined petals and leaves are tattooed on the outer upper arm, with the upper rose sitting above a second, slightly larger one. The linework is dark and bold, with grey shading inside the petals and along the leaves. The arm is pulled up by a grey t-shirt sleeve, with long wavy hair falling on the right side of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, don't you go telling Morag I said it, but the roses on Eilean Dubh were never meant to grow at all. Salt takes everything on that rock, the sheep, the boats, the chapel roof twice over. So when Ruairidh Macleod came back from the mainland with two bare-root cuttings wrapped in wet sacking, the whole township stood on the pier to watch him fail.

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He planted them in the lee of the byre wall, where the peat was thick and the wind lay down for an afternoon if you were lucky. He fed them with seaweed and his own patience, and he cut the dead wood out with a blade he kept sharp on the back step. The first summer they gave nothing but leaves, grey-green and stubborn. The second summer one bloom opened, then a second, bigger and browner at the edges, the way a rose gets when it has fought for every inch of its colour.

Now the thing about a rose on an island is that it does not forget where it came from. Ruairidh's wife went across on the Tuesday boat and never came back, and the roses kept flowering regardless, deep and heavy, as though they'd been promised to someone. Every June he cut two stems and rowed them out past the skerry and let the tide have them.

The autumn he died, the younger ones found the bushes had grown over the byre door entirely. They had to cut their way in with shears. Inside, on a nail, hung a tin with a letter in it, and the letter was only one line long: the rocks are wrong for roses, but I was never wrong about you.