Black and grey traditional style rose tattoo with leaves, flowers and a shell on the neck and upper chest, with script lettering below.

Large rose with shell and flowers on neck and chest

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose dominates the neck and upper chest, surrounded by leaves, small flowers and a shell motif. The rose has bold black outlines with soft grey shading on the petals. Script lettering is partly visible lower down on the chest, and a blonde-haired person's neck and shoulder fill the rest of the frame.

Traditional Neck Chest Rose Leaves Flower Shell Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada found the rose bush under the snow on the second Tuesday of January, its canes black as rope against the south wall of the old dairy. Her father had planted it the spring her mother left for the coast, and nobody had pruned it since. Frost had split the bark along two stems, but the buds at the top were still closed tight, hard as pearl buttons.

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She cut three canes with the pruning saw and carried them into the kitchen wrapped in a feed sack. The range was still warm from the morning. Her brother Tom came in stamping, complaining about the ewes in the top field, and stopped when he saw what she had on the table.

"That's dead," he said.

"It's sleeping," she said, and ran the blade down the nearest cane until a sliver of green showed beneath the bark. He didn't argue. He had never won an argument with her about that bush.

They kept the canes in a jug of water for eleven days, changing it each morning. On the twelfth, a single petal unfolded the colour of weak tea, then the rest followed, slow as a tide, until the kitchen smelled of June in the coldest week of the year. Tom pinned the bloom to the calendar beside the tally of lambs and drew a shell in the margin, because their mother used to say the sea was the only thing that ever made her stop talking. Outside, the snow kept falling on the bare wall where the bush had been, and Ada left the window open an inch so the scent could find its way out.