Close-up of a black and grey botanical rose tattoo on the upper hip, beside a navel piercing, with a dark patterned thong visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose tattoo on a hip

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photo is a close crop of a torso and upper thigh showing a large rose in black ink on the side of the hip, with its petals and leaves outlined and shaded. The shading is soft and tonal, with grey wash in the petals and darker lines at the edges. The rose sits against bare skin, and a navel piercing and a dark patterned thong are visible in the frame.

Botanical Other Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The Bramleys came in heavy this year, so heavy Dad has propped the lower boughs with forked ash poles like crutches. You'd laugh. He's stubborn about it and says the trees know when they're being looked after. I've been up the ladder since six most mornings, filling the wicker skeps, and the wasps find the windfalls before I do.

The rose is still going on the wall by the gate, the one Granddad put in the year before he died. He grafted a cutting onto the wild stock at the bottom of the orchard, and nobody believed it would take. Every August it throws out a second flush of blooms, dark red going nearly black at the heart, and the bees go mad for it. I cut three stems this morning and set them in a jam jar on the windowsill of the press house.

Here's the thing I wanted to tell you. Mr Halloran from the cider co-op came by on Tuesday and offered to buy the eastern block for the new estate. He had a folder of drawings with little blue houses in rows. I told him the orchard isn't for sale while Dad's still breathing. He didn't argue. He just looked past me at the rose and said it was a shame to lose the old varieties, then left his card on the gatepost under a stone.

I'm writing because I haven't decided, and I wanted someone who knew the trees to hear me not decide. Come down for the pressing. Bring the good knife. We'll cut the last of the wall rose together, and you can tell me what Granddad would have done.

Love, Margaret