Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Bold black rose design with stem
Botanical · Black and grey · Flash
A solid black rose drawn in bold, flowing linework, with the petals curling open at the top of the design. A long, tapering stem runs down from the bloom and has small thorn-like marks along its length. The design is in pure black on a plain white background, with the rose centred and the stem leading the eye downward.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit down, the lot of you, before the sausage rolls go cold, and let me tell you about the rose that grew up through the wall behind the old bike sheds. You'll remember it. Nobody could cut it back. Mr Abbott tried with a billhook in 1974 and came away with his sleeve in ribbons.
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Its keeper was a girl called Winifred Cole, who wore her father's boots to school and drew on everything she was given. Her exercise books came back from the teachers with black ink roses all over the margins, every one with its petals curling open like a question. She drew with a nib so sharp it hissed on the paper. When the head asked her what she meant by it, she said a flower only has to be right once.
The year the wall came down for the new car park, the builders found a tin under the roots. Inside were forty-one sheets of drawing paper, each showing the same rose from a slightly different angle, and on the last one, in pencil, a note: The stem goes down because something has to hold it.
Nobody here has ever found out who she was waiting for, and I have stopped asking. But I'll tell you what I did with the tin. I planted a cutting by the gate, and it has been coming up thorny ever since, and I have never once been caught by it on the way in. Now pass the sausage rolls.
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