Black and grey realism rose tattoo on the top of a foot, with shaded leaves and a partly visible script beside it.

Black and grey rose on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose with shaded petals and layered leaves sits across the top of a foot, with toes visible at the bottom of the frame. The rose is rendered in smooth grey shading with soft highlights on the petals and darker tones in the leaves and the base of the bloom. A faint script line runs up the outer side of the foot to the right of the rose, but its letters are not legible.

Realism Botanical Other Rose Leaves Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Ansa had the last rose on Skerrow, and she would not let anyone cut it. The bush grew out of the wall behind the kirk, where the wind came off the sound carrying salt, and its flowers opened in the colour of wet slate. The men who came over on the Tuesday boat laughed at it. A black rose, they said, is only a red one that has forgotten how to be red.

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Ansa did not argue. Each evening she went down with a tin bucket and a bent knife, cut the leaves gone yellow at the edge, and talked to the bush the way she talked to her goats, plainly and without fuss. When the lighthouse boy asked why she bothered, she told him the rose had been planted by a woman who waited for a fishing fleet that never came in, and that the least a garden could do was keep its promises for her.

In the autumn the sea rose higher than anyone could remember. The lower field went under, then the path, and the boy came up the hill soaked to the thigh with word that the boat would not run for a month. Ansa sent him to the wall. Beneath the bush, where the stones stayed dry, he found a tin box holding a fishing ledger, names and dates in a clerk's careful hand, and a last line in pencil: The rose is ours. Keep it dark until we are home.

The boy read it twice and said nothing. Ansa took the box from him, tucked it under her arm, and walked down to the slip, where the tide had left a single black petal lying on the wet stones, its grey edges already drying in the light.