Neo-traditional botanical tattoo of wild roses, a succulent, ferns and berries across a shoulder and upper arm, shaded in peach, olive and black.

Wild rose and fern across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with two large wild rose blooms in peach tones, a rosette succulent in grey-green, and leaves outlined in bold black. Black fern fronds and small dark red berries fill the gaps around the flowers, arcing over the top of the shoulder. The shading is soft and the palette is muted, with mostly olive greens and peach with some grey, set against the pale skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Succulent Fern Berry Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed-keeper's girl walked three days across the salt flats with the rose in a tin box strapped against her ribs, because her grandmother had told her a rose wants a warm body or it forgets how to open. By the second night the box was warm enough to feel through the cloth, so she slept at the ruined pumping station with it in her lap, listening to the dry wind pull at the iron.

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Behind the walls of Hollin Ferry the river had gone under the hills in the long heat, and nothing green had grown since except the grey succulents clinging to the roofs and the black fern creeping up the cistern steps. The council kept water in brass tanks and counted every cup. Nobody there had seen a flower in eleven years. A swallow had come to the seed-house window in spring with a dark wing trailing from one leg, and her grandmother had taken that as a sign that someone was still asking for things.

At the gate the warden, a thin man called Osric Ballantyne with a ledger under his arm, said the tanks had no room for rot. She did not argue. She lifted the lid from the tin and set it on the gatepost, and there was the rose, two blooms open in the morning light, peach at the edges and dusted gold at the heart, with red berries ripening along the stem. Ballantyne looked at it for a long time. Then he shut the ledger.

They planted it by the cistern steps, where the fern was already reaching. By midsummer the vine had climbed the wall and over the lintel, and the children carried water to it in cupped hands, one cup each, counted by nobody. The girl walked home across the flats with an empty tin and nothing to strap to her ribs. She did not look back to see whether the blooms had opened again, because she already knew they had.