Realism style black and grey tattoo of three roses, swirling shading and a hanging rosary with a cross on the side of a torso, above the hip.

Black and grey roses with rosary on the side

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three shaded roses descend diagonally across the side of the torso, with a rosary of beads ending in a fleur-de-lis and a solid black cross. Soft grey smoke-like swirls fill the space between the roses, and the petals use fine gradations of grey for depth. The image is a close-up colour photograph with the tattoo as the clear focus against warm skin tones.

Realism Ribs Rose Rosary Cross Bead Fleur-de-lis Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage came up at half past six with the men still grey from the seam, and Nessa Dunn stood at the pithead gate with her hands knotted in her apron. She counted them the way her mother had taught her, under her breath, lips moving. Eleven. Twelve. Joe Lowry was the thirteenth, and he was not there.

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Her mother's roses grew against the slag wall at the bottom of the street, and they had gone dark at the edges from the smoke that rolled off the heap every winter. Still they flowered each June, heavy-headed and stubborn, and Joe had cut one for her the morning he left for his shift, pushing the stem through the buttonhole of her cardigan with a grin that said he knew she would pretend to scold him. The rosary had been his grandmother's. He had wound it twice around his wrist before he went down, the little silver cross swinging against his watch.

At the chapel the rescue men were talking in low voices about the east drift and a fall of roof that might have taken the whole of it. Nessa did not sit. She pulled the beads through her fingers from the cross to the fleur-de-lis, one decade at a time, and she did not ask God to bring Joe up alive. She asked only that the men who went down after him would come up too, and that their wives would not have to count.

At a quarter to nine a lamp moved along the bottom of the lane. It was Joe, filthy to the eyebrows, a bandage tight around his head, one arm slung over the shoulder of a stranger. Nessa counted him twice, out loud this time, and the number came out right. She kept the rosary in her fist until the cross bit a little red mark into her palm.