Flash sheet of three botanical designs: a coloured rose bouquet, a navy wreath with Stop and Smell the Roses lettering, and a floral heart with Joie de Vivre script.

Floral bouquet, rose wreath lettering and floral heart

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows three separate tattoo designs on a plain white background. On the left is a loose bouquet of coral and pink roses with green foliage and small buds, and in the centre is a navy line-drawn wreath of leaves and roses enclosing the phrase Stop and Smell the Roses. On the right, Joie de Vivre is written in black script above a heart filled with small multicoloured flowers, using flat colour with no shading.

Botanical Lettering Rose Bouquet Flower Leaves Wreath Heart Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came aboard at Rotterdam with a label in Dutch and a warning in English, THIS SIDE UP, which the mate read as a suggestion. Forty bare-root roses, wrapped in sacking and smelling of wet earth, bound for a nursery outside Spalding. Nobody on the Ellen Marr wanted them. The bosun said they'd take the last inch of deck space, and I said they could have my bunk before my stove.

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I should say I'm a cook, not a gardener. My job is to keep eleven men fed on a boat that rolls like a drunk. But on the third night out the weather turned and the crate broke loose in the hold, and I was the one who went down with a torch to lash it. Half the canes had split. One bush had a single bud still tight and green, and when I cracked the sacking it smelled so sharp and sweet that I forgot the bilge water running round my boots.

I put it in a jam jar on the galley shelf, next to the salt and the tinned peaches. The lads came in for their tea and stopped mid-sentence. Old Harry, who has never once in twenty years noticed anything that wasn't on fire, said, 'Stop and smell the roses, Dennis,' and laughed himself into a cough. I told him to get out of my galley. He didn't get out. He leaned over the jar and breathed in like a man at a funeral.

The bud opened on the last morning, as we came up the Wash with the gulls screaming over the mudflats. I cut it free for the nursery man at Sutton Bridge, who held it as if it might bite. He never asked what I'd been doing with it. I still have the jar, empty now, with a brown ring of water on the shelf where it stood, and every morning I put the kettle on beside it.