Black and grey shaded rose with swirling scrollwork on a person's ribs, with a navel piercing visible below.

Black and grey rose with scrolls on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits at the centre of the tattoo, with its petals shaded in smooth grey gradients and highlights left as bare skin. Fine black linework with curling scrolls and small leaves extends outward on both sides, framing the flower. The tattoo is photographed close up on a torso, with a navel piercing visible lower in the frame and a tiled floor in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

The frost got into the top field again on Tuesday, and I lost two more ewes before Dad could get the lamp lit. I'm writing because the rose by the back gate has done something daft. You remember Mum's climber, the one she swore was dead after the great gale? Its root sat under the water butt all these years, and this January it sent up a shoot as thick as a pencil, grey-green at the tip, with a bud the size of a walnut. I cut it back to nothing and it still opened, a dark red bloom that looked nearly black in the lantern light.

I took a photograph for you, though the phone shows it in greys, which is how I'd describe it anyway: smoke and silver, the petals folding over each other like a letter read too many times. Round the base the bindweed has started curling up the wire in those scrolls Mum used to draw on the backs of seed packets. I never knew she drew them until I found her sketchbook in the dresser drawer, pages of ferns and spirals, and one sheet with a rose in the middle and a line underneath: For Ruth, when the wind stops.

Dad wants the bank cleared for the new silage pit, and the rose is in the way. I told him it could wait until the thaw. He grumbled, but he left the spade in the shed.

This morning I tied a strip of Mum's green apron round the stem so the shears wouldn't catch it. It looks ridiculous, a bit of faded cotton on a bush in the snow, but it's the only thing I've found that keeps the cold off it. Write back soon, and tell Jen the lambs are sorting themselves out, or at least that you hope they are.

Love, Ellie

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