Side-by-side photos of an ankle: on the left a blue-green rose tattoo, on the right the same area with the ink largely faded.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Faded rose ankle tattoo, before and after laser removal

Ankle · Colour · Photo

The left photo shows a blue-green tattoo of a rose-like flower on the outside of an ankle, with a smaller motif of two figures below it. The right photo shows the same area after treatment, where the ink has faded to a pale, blurred outline. The images are shown side by side with bright, even lighting and a plain background.

Ankle Rose Flower Before and after

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tommy Leask drew the rose on the back of a dockside menu with a biro that ran dry halfway through the petals, so the flower came out with one side missing. He said the pale part would fill in by morning. I was nineteen and believed him. We were in the galley of the Sheila Mair, a supply boat out of Peterhead, and the fryer was still ticking as it cooled.

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He did the needle work himself, a sewing needle wrapped in cotton and dipped in Indian ink he'd bought off a bosun who swore by it. The skin on the outside of his ankle went red and then angry, and he hummed a Proclaimers song through his teeth the whole time. Below the rose he added two small figures with round heads and no necks. He said they were his mother and the ship's cat, though the cat had been dead since the spring and the mother had never once set foot on a boat. I never asked which was which.

Thirty years later he came into the Aberdeen clinic I was working at as a receptionist, rolling up his trouser leg with the air of a man reporting a stolen van. The laser made a snapping noise like hot fat in a pan. The rose went first, from the centre outwards, until only the petals near the edge held on. The two figures were the last to leave, as if they had been stubborn about it.

I still wipe the steel counter at the end of a shift and sometimes catch a bloom in the wet sheen, half there, half not, with a gap where the biro gave out.