Black line drawing of a hand delicately holding a rose stem with leaves, beside a triangle containing the number 13, on a peach background.

Hand holding a rose stem with triangle 13

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows a hand with fingers curled around a thin stem that bends into a rose with two small leaves. A triangle containing the number 13 sits to the lower right of the hand. The linework is fine and uniform, with short hatching marks shading the fingers and cuff, and the design is centred on a plain peach background.

Fine line Botanical Hand Rose Stem Leaves Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thirteenth gate of Aldermoor stood open only on the feast of the bread-cutters, and nobody in the kingdom had walked through it in living memory. Tamsin the miller's daughter knew this because her grandmother had told her so while kneading, and because the gatekeeper, a thin man called Peverel, said it every morning to anyone who asked. She asked anyway. Her brother had gone through it in the spring to fetch back a goat and had not come out the other side, and the goat had come home alone with a rose stem caught in its collar.

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She went at dusk with a loaf wrapped in cloth and the stem in her fist, which she had kept dry in the flour bin for a month. Beyond the gate the road was grey and the hedges were bare, but the air smelled of late summer. At a crossroads sat a stone with a triangle cut into it, and inside the triangle someone had scratched the number thirteen. Under it lay a rose, freshly bloomed, its two leaves still wet.

She understood then that the rose was not a gift but a question, and that she was expected to answer it with her hand. So she took hold of the stem where the thorns began and held it gently, the way her brother had held the goat's rope, and the road bent round behind her like a sleeve being turned inside out. When she looked back the gate was still there, and her brother was on the far side of it, laughing at her for being late with the bread.

She gave him the loaf. He gave her back the goat. Neither of them ever explained how the rose had come to be in the bin, though the old women in Aldermoor still say a stem held that gently will always find its way home.