Black and grey dotwork rose tattoo with outlined leaves on the side of the ribs, with a light patterned top visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork rose on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose with curled petals and three outlined leaves, drawn with bold black linework. The petals and shadows are built from fine stippled dots, which give the rose soft grey shading. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame on bare skin, with a hand and a light patterned fabric visible at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's been at the herring again. You want the rose on the sea wall? Then you'll have it the way my grandfather gave it to me, not the way the Pilchard Inn tells it with the lights on.

Keep reading

Edith Quill planted it the spring the Mary Jane went down off the Stack. Six boats had gone out that morning and five came back. Edith stood on the wall with a bucket of seawater and a bent spoon, and she dug a hole in the cracked mortar where nothing had any business growing. Her husband had been aboard the Mary Jane. The men laughed at her. Salt kills everything that isn't a gull, they said.

But she watered it every dawn with a tin dipper and never once with fresh, and the bush grew stubborn and grey, like fog lying on the water before the sun gets up. Its petals came slow. Each one was made of a thousand small pricks of cold, the way spray comes at you in a northerly, until the whole bloom goes soft and dim as a pewter plate.

The year the fleet came back short again, Edith cut the one bloom that had opened and laid it on the stern of the Gannet, the old boat with no crew left to claim her. Next morning the Gannet had shifted on her mooring, pointed out past the Stack as if someone had her wheel. Some say the tide did it. I say the rose wanted a boat to answer to, and it got one. Now go on, the tide's turning, and that rose will want its water.

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