Realistic black and grey roses with red-tinged petals and thorny stems tattooed along a person's ribs.

Black and grey roses on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Three roses in varying stages of bloom sit on the side of the torso, with one large central rose flanked by two smaller ones. Thorny stems curl between the blooms and are rendered in fine, dark linework. The petals are shaded in smooth greys with soft red tints along the edges, and the composition wraps around the curve of the ribs.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Thorn Stem Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the boarding house at Scarth Bay smelled of wet wool and paraffin, and Mrs Pardoe had given up pretending the back garden would come good. You are the one who carries the coal up the cliff steps each morning, so you are the one who notices the roses behind the old shed: three bushes gone wild and grey with salt, still pushing out buds that nobody picks.

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Ellis Tranter, the lodger in the attic room who reads the tide tables aloud at breakfast, tells you the darkest one is called Widow's Cheek, and that his grandmother grew it in Whitby before the sea took the terrace. You cut three stems with the kitchen shears and wrap them in a page of yesterday's paper. The thorns snag your cardigan and draw a bead of blood on your wrist, and you suck it off and go on cutting, because Mrs Pardoe has said that anything worth keeping is worth a scratch.

The guests leave in November and the house goes quiet enough to hear the lighthouse horn. In March a letter comes for Ellis in a hand you do not recognise, and he reads it on the step with his cap in his fist and does not come in for an hour. You plant the cuttings along the south wall, where the sun reaches at four o'clock and no longer than that.

By June the largest bloom has opened, its petals dark as a wet slate and blushed at the edges the colour of the tide line. You are kneeling in the mud with the trowel when you look up and see Mrs Pardoe at the kitchen window, arms folded, watching the way she watches weather come in over the headland. She does not wave. She does not need to.