Two matching black and grey traditional rosette tattoos with layered leaves on the knees, with a small sunrise tattoo above the right knee.

Matching rosette tattoos on both knees

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two identical rosette designs sit on the front of each knee, each with a central star medallion inside a beaded ring and surrounded by layered pointed leaves. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading giving the medallion and leaves depth. A small sunrise over waves is tattooed above the right knee, and dark shorts are visible at the top of the frame.

Traditional Blackwork Other Rosette Star Leaves Mandala Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind-rose on the wheelhouse wall had been painted over three times since my grandmother's day, and every time the crew scraped it back, the star underneath came up sharper. Eight points, a brass boss at the centre, and a ring of beading that Tomasz swore was the tide ladder. Nobody on the Lantern Tern trusted the new plotting screens after the Seal Bank took the Marigold in a fog. We trusted the rose.

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We were three days out from Harwich, if Harwich still meant anything, with the Seal Bank somewhere under a grey skin of swell. Ines had the tiller and I had the tide clock, a crooked thing of gears that ticked against the glass. The leaves of the rose ran outward in layers, each point marked with a slack-water time my grandmother had scratched in with a nail. I read them off like verses. Ebb at the third leaf. Slack at the fifth. Nothing moved on the screens, so I believed the metal.

The fog lifted just before the light came. A thin red seam opened over the water, then the sun rose out of it, flat and burning, and laid a road of colour across the waves. Ines said nothing. She didn't need to. The road ran straight through the gap in the bank that the rose had always pointed at, the one nobody had charted since the water rose. We crept through with the sun on our backs and the leaves turning black in the bright air.

When we tied up at Felixstowe pier, I took the rose down from its nail and rolled it under my arm. Tomasz asked what I was going to do with it. I said I was going to frame it, and that the next painter could start with the sun.