Close-up photograph of a colourful rose tattoo with black linework, red petals, and green and teal leaves on pale skin.

Watercolour-style rose tattoo

Botanical · Colour · Photo

A single rose fills the frame, drawn with bold black outlines that break the petals into angular sections. Red, pink, green and teal ink is washed across the petals and leaves, with soft edges that look like watercolour. Small black dots sit around the flower, and the composition is centred on a pale background of skin.

Botanical Rose Leaves Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry from Spalding came in forty minutes late, so the cold room was already warm when Dougie backed the trolley through, and by the time I had the shutter up the first crate had split along one seam. The roses lay on the wet concrete like someone had tipped a box of red glass onto the floor, every petal cut sharp where the stems had bent.

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I picked one up because nobody else would. The outer petal was torn, but the light from the strip bulbs caught the pink underneath, and the green of the stem looked almost blue in the cold. I put it in my coat pocket, then took it out again, because Mrs Pell would be at the gate at five and she never bought anything that came out of a whole crate. She said she liked things that had been taken apart and put back together, that you could see where the light got in.

She didn't come that Friday. Dougie said her son had rung the stall to say she'd gone into the Royal Infirmary on Tuesday night, and that the roses on her table had been left to die in their buckets. I stood by the gate with the rose in my hand until the sky over the car park turned the colour of weak tea.

I took the 6:12 home with the rose wrapped in a page of the Financial Times and set it in a jam jar on my windowsill. Outside, the streetlights clicked off one by one along the high street. In the window glass the petals showed every line where they had bent, black and clean, like a pane someone had mended and then forgotten to hide.