Traditional style flash drawing of a cartoon woman with dark red hair holding a red rose, with a red rose, blue leaves and a ribbon banner reading BELLE, shown without a body placement.

Belle with rose and banner flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a cartoon young woman with dark red hair in a high bun, wearing yellow gloves and holding a red rose near her face. She is framed by a large red rose, blue leaves and a cream ribbon banner lettered with the word BELLE. Bold black outlines, flat fills and a plain cream background give it a classic flash sheet look.

Traditional Woman Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose has been in the biscuit tin for nine weeks, pressed flat between the pages of a chart of the Drake Passage that nobody aboard the Harriet Lowe will ever need again. You bought it in Valparaíso from a girl with a basket on her arm, who swore it had come from her mother's yard and would keep if you did not breathe on it. You did not believe her. You bought it anyway, because the second mate had said a man who spends eleven months of the year among tar and salt ought to own one thing that smells of neither.

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Every evening since, you have opened the tin on the middle watch, when the deck is empty and the swell lifts the bow in long, unhurried slopes. The petals have gone from scarlet to the colour of old claret, then to something like rust, and still you check them the way other men check the glass. The ship's cat, who has no sense of occasion, sleeps on the chart. The navigator asks what you keep in there. You tell him it is nothing, which is the only lie you have told on this voyage that you are sure of.

At Falmouth the pilot comes aboard before the anchor is down, and the quay is crowded with the usual faces: wives, creditors, a man selling oranges from a barrow. You see her before you see anyone else, a small woman in a grey bonnet with one hand raised against the glare. She is not looking for you. She is looking past the rigging at the water, the way you looked at it for nine weeks. You go down the gangway with the tin under your arm and do not open it.

When you finally do, on the cobbles beneath the harbour wall, the rose has gone to paper and dust. She takes it from your palm anyway and holds it to her mouth, as though it were still warm, and for a moment neither of you says anything at all.