Black and grey wild rose tattoo with leaves on a shoulder, shown in a black and white photo of a bare-chested person.

Wild rose tattoo on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A single open wild rose with a centre of stamens and several leaves and stems curls across the upper shoulder. The linework is crisp and dark, with grey shading on the petals and leaves that gives them depth against the skin. The black and white photograph is tightly cropped to the shoulder, collarbone and upper chest, with a thin necklace resting at the neck.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Flower Leaves Stem Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lane out of Otterburn had been cut by carts for three hundred years, and the wild roses grew over it so thick in June that Ruth Addison rode her bicycle through a tunnel of them, petals catching in the spokes. Her father had always called the flower dog rose, though the vicar said that was wrong, and the old men at the Crown called it briar, and nobody agreed on anything except that it bled the lane white every summer and no one ever pruned it back.

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She had come home to sort the cottage after the funeral, and the estate agent wanted the hedges cleared before the photographs. On the third morning she took the shears to the hawthorn and left the roses alone, because they were on the far side of the wall, in the field that belonged to the Hallidays now, and the Hallidays had a dispute with her family about a boundary stone that had outlasted two solicitors. She told herself the roses were not hers to cut.

That afternoon a boy from the farm came up the track with a dog that would not stop barking at the gate. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked past her at the hedge. "Mam says you can have the ones on our side," he said. "She says they're for taking."

Ruth cut a single stem, thorns and all, and pressed one open bloom between the pages of her father's Ordnance Survey map, folded to the page with the lane on it. When she unpicked it a week later, the petals had kept their five pale circles, and the dark gold centre had gone the colour of tea. She carried it south in her coat pocket, and it was the only thing she brought home that had been growing.