Black and grey realism tattoo of two roses with script lettering and a small cross on the side of the ribs.

Black and grey roses with script on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two large roses are shown on the side of a torso, with one rose slightly higher than the other. A flowing script lettering runs between the blooms, and a small cross sits on the upper rose. The shading is soft and smooth, with grey tones building petal edges and highlights, and the composition wraps around the curve of the body.

Realism Lettering Ribs Rose Script Lettering Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maureen had counted the floors from her balcony rail every morning since March, eleven storeys of washing lines and satellite dishes, and the two roses in the green tubs were the only things up there anyone had planted on purpose. The council letter had come on the Tuesday, and by the Thursday her grandson Kieran was standing among the pots with his granddad's secateurs, looking at the blooms as if they might argue.

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'They've gone leggy,' he said. 'You'll get nothing off them next year if I don't cut them back.'

'Cut the one on the left,' she said. 'It's the one that's leaning on the railing like it wants to go over. The other one can stay where it is. Your grandad put the cross on that one's stake, and he'd have had something to say if the wind took it.' She tapped the pot with her slipper. 'Time won't wait for anybody, he used to say, usually when I was dawdling over the bins.'

Kieran snipped the left-hand stem and laid it on the concrete, then bent to gather the fallen petals from the walkway below before the lift men could sweep them away. He came back up with a handful, grey-pink and bruised at the edges, and held them out to her as if he had been asked to bring something from a shop.

She pressed them into the pocket of her housecoat and watched the lift doors open at the end of the corridor, the flat light falling across the car park where the new fencing was already going up. Next spring, she decided, she would ask the lad to help her put a bench out here, the sort you could sit on with a cup of tea and still see the whole of the estate going about its business below.