Banknote rose on the back of a hand
Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo
A realistic rose sits across the back of a hand, with its petals rendered in soft grey shading and fine lines. The petals carry printed banknote-style lettering and pattern, and the shading gives the rose depth against the skin. A second hand holds up a blue ink stencil of the same design at the left edge of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit yourself down, and mind the ink on that stool. I'll tell you about the rose Harriet Coyle folded out of spoilt paper, because nobody else in this works remembers it but me.
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Harriet worked the sheet tables at Gellert and Sons in Walsall, where every banknote run got checked by hand before it went out. A sheet with a smudged numeral got a punch through one corner and went down to the pulper with the rest. Harriet couldn't bear it. She kept the ones with the finest engraving, where the lettering curled round the portrait like the grain in old oak, and she slid them under the ledger weights to flatten them. Every Friday one went home in her coat.
Mr Rudd, the foreman, caught her at it and gave her a choice: the pulper or a stencil. So she traced a rose on a sheet of the blue carbon they used for proofs, and cut it so the words ran round the petals, ONE and TEN and FIVE spiralling in towards the middle. Then she folded thirty notes into petals and pinned the lot above the number three press. It was the first thing in that building anyone had made that wasn't worth a penny more than the paper.
Rudd kept the stencil in his desk drawer. Last I saw it, there was still a thumbprint of blue on one corner, where somebody had held it up to the window to check the lines.
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