Neo-traditional flash design of a cartoon princess in a gold gown, with a beast tattoo on her shoulder, framed by red roses and a banner.

Cartoon princess with roses and banner flash

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A cartoon princess with long curled brown hair and a gold gown is shown in a bust pose, one hand raised to her head. A small beast-like tattoo with a script word sits on her shoulder, and a pink heart shape appears near her chest. Red roses, green leaves and a ribbon banner reading TILL THE LAST PETAL FALLS frame the figure inside a pale oval with a soft blue background.

Neo-trad Princess Rose Banner Beast Script Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are piping the last sugar rose onto the wedding cake when the bell above the door goes, though the shop has been shut since nine and the sky over the car park is still the colour of cold dishwater. Mrs Hollis has a key, which is how she comes in each morning at four for the first tin loaf, but the man behind her is nobody from the parish. He stoops under the lintel, his travelling coat is stiff with frost, and he carries a wicker basket of bramble cuttings as though it might bite.

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"I need a rose that will last," he says, and sets the basket on the marble. You tell him sugar roses are the one thing in this shop that cannot last, since the damp sees to them by lunchtime. He laughs without much humour and speaks of a girl in the big house up the hill, of a bargain her father struck with something that was not quite a man, and of a petal count that ends it. "Till the last petal falls," he says, as if reading the sign above a fairground stall. You have heard fairy tales before. Your gran used to sell them with the jam tarts.

You do not believe him, but you know the feel of a promise made in flour and sugar. So you knead a little gold colouring into a fresh batch of paste, shape a rose with fourteen petals, and press each edge until it is thin as paper. You set it on the cake beside the others and tell him the only trick you know: a petal falls when it is handled by hands that have stopped caring. He asks what you mean. You tell him to come back at dawn.

At six the window greys and the gold rose is still whole, its edges dull with dew. He stands in the doorway turning his hat in his hands, and something in his shoulders has loosened, so that for once he looks like a man who has been allowed to go home. He takes the rose, thanks you, and walks off up the hill without once looking back at the basket. You wipe down the bench. The cake still waits for its bride, and every petal on it is holding.