Black and grey dotwork rose with leaves and a stem on the back of a hand, with a ring on a finger beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork rose and leaves on the hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A rose with a stem, leaves and two small droplets is tattooed on the back of a hand and across the base of a finger. The bloom and leaves are outlined in bold black linework, with stippled dotwork shading in the petals and leaf edges. The design is in black and grey only, and the rose sits near the centre of the frame with the fingers extending to the lower right.

Dotwork Botanical Hand Rose Leaves Stem Droplet Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab Quinn had been hauling the same rope for three hours when the net came up heavy with a rose. It was no flower the sea had any business growing. Its petals were stippled grey as dusk, its leaves were edged with fine black lines, and caught in its stem were two drops of water that would not run off.

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She carried it home in her apron and set it in a jam jar on the windowsill, where the harbour light could find it. Nobody in Wickwell would say what it meant. Old Tamsin at the chandlery said roses grew only where someone had been buried with love, and Mab said that was nonsense, though she watered it anyway, a splash each morning from the tap that ran brackish.

The rose did not wilt. Each dawn the two drops had doubled, then doubled again, until they spilled down the glass and pooled on the sill, and the pool smelled of rain on warm stone. Mab began to dream of a man in a blue jersey who asked her to keep the rope steady. On the ninth morning she found the jar empty and the sill dry, and beside it a folded note in her husband's handwriting. He had gone out with the herring fleet eleven years before and never come back.

The note said only: the tide has turned, you can let go now. She let go. Out past the breakwater the sea lay flat and silver, and from the church tower a bell that had been silent since the war rang once for the boats.