Black and grey script tattoo reading Vincit qui se vincit with a shaded rose and stem on the side of the ribs, in a fine line and realism style.

Latin script motto with a shaded rose

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo reads Vincit qui se vincit across the skin, with a shaded black rose at the right end and a curling stem with a small leaf below it. The lettering is fine and even, while the rose uses denser shading and highlights to give it depth. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the tattoo sits on the side of the torso with the subject shown in soft, natural light.

Lettering Botanical Ribs Rose Script Latin phrase Leaf Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, because the fire won't keep past midnight and I'll not tell this twice. Harold Pitt farmed the bottom field above Lower Scarth, and he had a temper on him like a bull in a bad spring. Every quarrel he had, he fought with his fists or his tongue, and he won most of them and lost the rest to his own shouting. In the winter of the great frost, his wife Edie set a rose cutting by the back step, a dark red thing from her mother's garden, and told him it would outlast the pair of them if he left it be.

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Harold did not leave it be. In January the wind came off the moor and tore the shed door clean off its hinges, and he went at the wood with an axe and a curse, and the cutting snapped under his boot. He stood there with the frost cracking the puddles and the broken stem in his hand, and he could not think who he was angry at. Edie found him on the step an hour later, still holding it. She said nothing. She only took the stem, bound it to a stake with a strip torn from her apron, and went back in to put the kettle on.

Come March the stem had put out a leaf, small and bright as a farthing. Harold checked it every morning before he went out to the ewes, and he found he had no wish to break it. The rose came in June, dark as a bruise, and it curled up over the step like a question nobody was in a hurry to answer.

The stake is still leaning there, and the faded scrap of apron is still knotted round it. Harold has been dead these forty years, but the rose has never once been pruned by anyone's temper, and every June it flowers just as he learned to.