Large red rose tattoo with sketchy black linework and green leaves across the upper back, in a watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour rose on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large rose sits across the upper back, drawn with loose black linework and shaded hatching over a red wash. Green leaves frame the bloom, and the watercolour-like colour bleeds past the outlines. The image is a close view of the back and neck, with dark hair pulled up at the top of the frame.

Botanical Back Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the rose on the fourteenth floor of Hallam House, drawn in marker on the lift wall beneath a notice about the bin chute. Someone has gone over the petals three times, black lines overshooting the bloom, and then someone else has washed it red with what looks like a wet thumb of cheap paint. Mrs Okonedo from flat 22 says it was there before the lift was refitted, and that nobody has the nerve to scrub it.

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You are the one with the scraper, because the council sent you up with a bucket and a list of graffiti to clear before the inspector came on Thursday. Nine floors of tags, a rude word in capitals on the stairwell door, a phone number for a man called Dee who fixes everything. You leave the rose till last. Standing close, you see the hatching is careful, cross-hatched like someone who had time to think about shadow, and the leaves are green where the paint has run out past the lines.

On Thursday the inspector is a young man with a clipboard who stops at the lift and says, "That one's nice." You tell him it's staying. He shrugs and ticks a box. Mrs Okonedo brings you a cup of tea in a mug that says Skegness, and she tells you her husband drew it in 1987 while he was courting her from the flat below, and that the petals were red then too, though the paint has faded down to the line.

You do not believe her, and then you do, a little, because the bleed looks like something that has been living a long time. You leave the rose where it is. Each morning you press the call button and the lift carries you past it, black lines first, then red, then the leaves catching the light from the stairwell window, and you wonder who else is still waiting on a floor somewhere to be told it's allowed to stay.