Close-up of a multicoloured rose tattoo on a forearm, painted in blue, green, yellow, pink and red with loose black sketch lines around its edges.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large rose sits at the centre of the image, its petals built up in soft blue, green, yellow, pink, red and purple tones. The colour is applied in loose, blended washes that look painterly, and dark sketchy lines frame the outer edge of the bloom. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a forearm, with a dark-clothed person and a faint partial tattoo visible at the right edge.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry comes in at ten past two with its hazard lamps still going, and the driver is reaching for the manifest before you have your torch up. Roses, he says. Forty boxes from the valley side, cut yesterday, bound for a florist in the next town who will not pay for them if they arrive grey. You know the rule. Nothing living crosses the line without its papers stamped twice, and nothing with papers is ever this late.

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You open the third box yourself because the seal is cracked. The blooms have been packed too tight, and their outer petals have bruised into the kind of colour you only see in a watercolour left out in the rain: blue bleeding into green, a thread of yellow, a red that has run down toward the stem and stopped there. The hearts are still closed. Someone took care over them. Every stem is wrapped in brown paper and numbered in pencil.

The paper on the last stem is not brown. It is a sheet torn from a school exercise book, and across it, in careful capitals, someone has written the name of a village on the far side of the river, then the word HOME, then, smaller, the date of a wedding twenty years gone. You read it twice. The driver has fallen asleep against his wheel. None of this is in the regulations.

You stamp the manifest once, not twice, and carry the last rose to the window where the barrier lamps are turning the wet tarmac to glass. You hold it up against the sky, which is doing the same thing the petals have done, running blue into rose into gold, and you let the lorry through on one stamp.