Two small traditional-style Tudor rose tattoos in red and blue on the side fingers of two hands pressed together, with black script lettering tattooed on the thighs behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching Tudor roses on two fingers

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are pressed together, showing a small Tudor rose tattoo on the middle finger of each hand. Each rose has red petals, a blue-green outline and a centre of blue and yellow shading, with clean, bold linework. Behind the hands, black script lettering is partly visible on the thighs, cropped at the edges of the frame.

Traditional Hand Rose Script lettering Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roof bosses at Ashby Minster were promised by Michaelmas, and by the third week of October Tom Garrow and Ned Sayer had not spoken a civil word since the scaffold went up. Garrow carved for the Lancastrian lord who paid the fabric fund; Sayer had been hired on the Yorkist steward's word and never once let Garrow forget it. Between them stood a single block of limestone, and on it a rose the size of a cartwheel that neither would agree to finish.

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It was the mason's boy who noticed the chisels. Each man had been cutting the same red petal in secret, one at a time, and the two halves did not meet at the seam. Sayer carried a pattern folded inside his coat, drawn on the back of a rent roll. Garrow had one burned into a board. Neither had drawn the centre, which was where the trouble lay: a blue heart and a golden one, shaded so the light fell differently on each side of the stone.

On the feast of All Souls they were found at dusk on the scaffold, sitting back to back with their hands raised between them, the middle fingers pressed together. Each had pricked a small rose into his own skin with a bone-handled awl and a pot of woad-blue ink, petal by petal, so that neither could claim the other had taken the upper hand. The boy said they had been there since the bell for vespers and had not spoken, only worked.

When the boss was finally set in the vault the following spring, it showed one rose, its two shades of red meeting at a seam no one could find. Garrow kept his tools in a box with York scratched on the lid. Sayer never opened it, and Garrow never asked him to.