Black and grey traditional rose with leaves tattooed on the back of a hand, with the word LOVE across the fingers.

Black and grey rose on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits across the back of a hand, with its layered petals, a centre of small dotted stamens and several serrated leaves framing it. The linework is bold and dark, and the petals are filled with smooth black shading that fades to light grey, giving the flower depth. The design fills most of the hand, with the word LOVE tattooed in simple capitals across the fingers and a small mark near the wrist.

Traditional Botanical Hand Rose Leaves Flower Love Lettering Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting rode the ferry wrapped in wet newspaper inside Morag's coat, and by the time the boat nosed into Scarrow harbour the paper had gone soft against her ribs. Nobody on the quay asked what she was carrying. They asked after her sister's hip and whether the Tuesday mail would come on the Wednesday again, and she answered them both, and kept walking up the brae with her hand pressed flat to her chest.

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Her mother had grown the rose against the south wall in Oban for forty years, dark in the shadow of the shed where the frost never quite reached. It flowered every June with petals so layered they looked stitched, and the leaves went almost blue in rain. Morag had taken the cutting the week after the funeral, while her brother was still arguing over the good teapot, and she had not told anyone why she needed it.

The island soil was thin and full of sand, and the wind came off the Atlantic as if it had a grievance to settle. Ewan Macleod, who mended the dykes for half the crofts, watched her dig at the north end of her strip of ground and said nothing about the wind. He brought a barrow of seaweed up from the shore without being asked and laid it thick around the stem, the way her mother used to do with kelp and a bucket of rainwater.

By August the first bloom had opened against the stones, and Morag stood in front of it with her hands in her pockets, counting the small dots at its centre. Five of them, like the pins her mother kept in a tin for mending. She pressed one petal flat between finger and thumb, then went inside to write to her brother that the teapot could stay where it was, because the rose had come through.