Yellow rose with green leaves and the words Strength and Courage on a forearm, drawn with black outlines and light grey shading.

Yellow rose with Strength and Courage on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A yellow rose with black outlines sits at the bottom of the design, with a green stem curving up the forearm towards the wrist. The words Strength and Courage run in black script along the stem, with green leaves branching from it. Yellow and green ink dominate the colour, with soft grey shading across the skin beside the vine.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Vine Stem Strength Courage Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had started its third slow number when Eddie Platt came through the side door with a yellow rose in his fist, the stem snapped short and still weeping sap. Doreen saw him before he saw her. He stood by the potted palms, rain running off his cap, looking less like a suitor than a man who had sprinted the length of the promenade. She set down her lemonade and waited.

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He crossed the sprung floor the long way, round the couples, and held the flower out without a word. The paper round the stem was soaked through. Someone had written on it in pencil, the letters already running: Strength. Courage. "They were clearing the Corporation greenhouse," he said. "Mr Hobday said they'd only go on the bonfire. I thought you'd want one that wasn't." The petals had gone the colour of old custard at the rim where the cold had got in.

The clarinet took up something slow and she didn't refuse him. They moved in a square between the palms while rain drummed on the glass roof. He said the rose wouldn't last the week. She said roses never did, and that was rather the point of them. Halfway through the next tune he laughed, the first proper laugh she'd had from him since spring, and a thorn caught the lace at her cuff and held on.

Afterwards she carried the rose home inside her coat and stood it in a jam jar on the windowsill above the chemist. The petals browned and dropped one by one onto the lino. The stem kept its green and pushed two pale roots into the water, so she stopped emptying the jar. By March it had a leaf the size of a thumb. The pencilled words had washed off the paper entirely, but she kept the paper anyway, folded in her purse.