Fine line black geometric rose tattoo on the ribs, with a white fabric draped over the side of the body.

Geometric rose on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A geometric rose made of overlapping angular petals, drawn in a single thin black outline that spirals towards a small centre. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribs on smooth skin, with the rest of the body and a white fabric partly visible around it. The composition is close and centred, with a plain light wall behind.

Fine line Geometric Botanical Ribs Rose Flower Geometric Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose on the back of the invoice was the fourth that week, and Walter Pallister took it as a personal insult. He ran the timber yard at the bottom of Harrowmere high street and did not hold with drawings. Ruth Carrow, who kept his books, only smiled and slid the pencil back into her hair. She had never drawn a rose the way the seed catalogues did. Hers had no soft edges. Every petal was a hard angle, each one overlapping the last, and the lines wound inward until the centre was a single point you could barely see.

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The town called it a folly. Pallister told her to draw the order forms properly or find another job, and she said the forms were properly drawn, thank you, and the roses were for her own sums. Then a county surveyor came in the spring of 1956 to measure the yard for a new loading road. He found a sheet of her roses pinned above the desk and stood a long while over it, tracing the spiral with one finger. He asked who had drawn the old river bend, and Ruth said her grandfather had, from the water itself.

The surveyor followed the inward lines to a corner of the yard where the stacked oak had gone soft and grey. Under the boards a spring had been pushing up for years, eating the ground from the middle outwards, the way the petals of her drawing closed in on their heart. They dug for two days. Pallister stood at the edge with his hat in his hands and said very little, which the men agreed was the most frightening thing they had seen him do.

When the new road was laid, Pallister sent Ruth a crate of seasoned pine with no invoice at all. On the lid, in pencil, she drew one more rose, and this time she left the centre open.