Black and grey engraving-style rose bouquet tattoo on a woman's upper back, between the shoulder blades, above a white lace top.

Vintage rose bouquet on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with shoulder-length wavy blonde hair and a white crochet lace top. A triangular bouquet of roses, leaves and small blossoms sits centrally on her upper back, with a trailing sprig at its base. The design uses fine black linework and cross-hatched shading in a vintage engraving style, all in black and grey on a plain, softly lit background.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Bouquet Leaves Blossom Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Thornby Green the week after the harvest, and with it came Abel Crane and his wagon of bottled weather. Mab Tully sold roses from the step of her mother's caravan. They were not real roses. Her grandmother had copied them from an old engraved seed book, cut them out, and pinned each one to wire, and nobody in the village had ever seen a rose that stayed open all winter.

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On the third night Abel stopped at her step with his hat in his hands. He wanted the bouquet from the top of the stall, the one with three full blooms and a sprig trailing down. He would pay in a year of rain for the wheat, he said, and in a child's cough that would stop by Candlemas. Mab asked what he would pay for her mother's hands, which were bent with the rheumatics. He said he could not do that. She said then the bouquet was not for sale.

He came back on the last night, when the lamps were going out along the row. This time he had no money and no bottles. He asked only to see the engraving the paper roses were copied from. She fetched the book with its foxed pages, and he turned them slowly until he reached the bouquet. He took a pencil from his coat and drew a single line under the sprig, the way an engraver cuts a vein in a leaf. Then he closed the book and walked off into the dark past the last caravan.

In the morning the wagon was gone, and so were the paper roses, every one, from the stall and from the caravan. Mab found the book open at the bouquet. The sprig now ran off the edge of the page and down the margin, and where it ended there was a pressed blossom no bigger than a fingernail, which had not been there before. Her mother said it was the kind of bargain a family could live with. Mab kept the book shut after that.