Black and grey dotwork rose with leaves tattooed on the centre of a torso above the navel, with a navel piercing visible below.

Black and grey rose on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits in the centre of the torso, with a bud-like upper leaf cluster and side leaves extending outwards. The petals are built from fine stippled dots and fine hatched lines, with heavier shading at the outer edges and lighter highlights at the centre of the bloom. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the torso, with paper towels at the top edges and a navel piercing visible lower down.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Rose Leaves Bud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the rain's come in under the awnings and you'll want to hear the end of this. Mind the drip off Halloran's tarp. Now. Every Saturday for forty winters a man called Tobias Quill set up a trestle between the eel barrow and the second-hand bookseller, and on it he laid out copper plates no bigger than a biscuit tin lid, each one a rose he had engraved by hand.

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He worked in dots, not lines. His right hand had a tremor the doctors could never name, so he learned to press the needle into the copper a little at a time, a thousand small punctures, until shadow gathered where the petals folded over. The outer petals he made heavy and dark, so they looked like they were turning away from the light. The centre he left almost bare, a pale heart that only showed once you stood close enough to smell the wet tarmac on your boots.

A girl from the wool shop asked him once why he never drew the stems. He said stems were for people who needed leading somewhere. A rose only needed a little leaf to hold it up, so he gave each one three: a bud at the top that had not yet decided to open, and two at the sides that reached out like open hands. He sold every plate for a shilling. Nobody bought them to frame. They bought them to hold, to feel the dots under a thumb.

The last plate he made was blank. When they found him in March the trestle was folded, the rain was pooling on the copper, and in the middle of the dampest sheet someone had scratched, with a pin and no great skill, a single dot. Halloran says it was a full stop. My mother says it was the start of a bud. I say go and buy a rose before the rain washes the market away, and then decide for yourself which it is.