Watercolour-style tattoo of pink roses and small dark-centred flowers with green splashes, running down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour roses and flowers on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large rose and several smaller flowers, with petals drawn in soft black and grey shading and loose pink and magenta washes. Green splashes and pink spatter sit around the edges, giving a painted, watercolour effect. The design climbs diagonally across the outer upper arm against a dark, blurred background.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Flower Petal Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the wasps had given up on the windfalls and turned their attention to us. Uncle Ray had me kneeling in the long grass under the Bramley rows, a bucket of wet sacking beside me, while he worked his budding knife along the bark of an old rose stock he'd dug out of the hedge at Hollin Farm. He never let me touch the knife. He said a wash of colour was easy, it was the edges that made a fool of you.

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The roses had come back from the lane wild and leggy, pink where the sun had reached them and bruised purple where it hadn't. Ray swore they flowered better for being ignored, so every morning I cut the spent heads and left the buds, hauling the cuttings past the plum tree that dripped sugar onto everything. The juice dried on my hands in sticky pink freckles. Ray laughed and said I looked like I'd been dipped in a jar of jam he'd forgotten about.

The grafts took, all but one. That one I'd been sure of, a sprig of mauve clematis Ray had cut from the wall of the cottage his mother was born in. On the Thursday I went out early and found it wilted on its stock, the bark gone soft and grey. I didn't say anything. I sat with the bucket and rinsed my hands while the mist burned off the field.

Ray came down the rows an hour later with his hat in his fist and didn't ask. He crouched beside me and tipped the bucket over the bruised cuttings, and the water ran pink across the grass as if someone had knocked over a paint pot. 'Some things only want a wash,' he said, and pressed his thumb to my wrist, smudging a single bright petal of juice into a shape that looked, if you squinted, like the start of a flower.