Black outline tattoo of a rose with stem and leaf on the side of a torso, in a botanical style, with clothes hanging blurred in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black line rose on the side of the torso

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline rose with a curling stem and one leaf is tattooed on bare skin at the side of the torso. The linework is bold and smooth, with solid black ink and no shading or colour. The rose fills the upper right of the frame, with a soft blurred background of hanging clothes on the left.

Botanical Ribs Rose Stem Leaf Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose was already drooping in its jam jar when Mags came aboard at Oxford, lashed to the cabin doors where the sun could get at it. I told her it would be dead by Abingdon. She said flowers on a boat were like cats in a bakery, they didn't need a reason to be there. I had bought the Mary Ann off a man called Teague, who kept a parrot that swore in Polish, and the barge came with a brass tiller, a stove that smoked whenever the wind came from the west, and a coil of rope nobody had ever managed to untangle.

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We worked the locks in a rhythm that suited neither of us. She walked the towpath with the windlass while I steered, and at Sandford the lock keeper, a woman with forearms like hams, watched us bump the gate and said nothing, which was worse than a telling off. Mags laughed about it all the way to Culham. She had a habit of pressing a leaf between the pages of the logbook, something from her childhood in Kent, and by the time we reached Wallingford the book was swollen with them, each one dated in pencil.

At Benson the rain came sideways off the Thames and the cabin filled with the smell of wet canvas. I found her on the roof with the jar in her lap, turning it so the stem coiled round the glass. The bloom had dropped most of its petals onto the hatch, dark at the edges, but the stem kept curling, reaching for a light that wasn't there any more.

I didn't say anything. I took the jar, set it on the stove shelf where the warmth was, and we lay awake listening to the water knock against the hull. In the morning there was one petal left, pinned flat in the logbook beside the others, and the rose stood bare in its jar, still leaning towards the window.