Traditional style tattoo of a message in a bottle with rope, pink roses and green leaves on a limb, with a red heart on the rolled note.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Message in a bottle with roses on skin

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a corked glass bottle with a rolled scroll inside, tied with rope and framed by two pink roses with yellow centres and dark green leaves. Bold black outlines define the bottle, rope and petals, with solid fills in teal, red, yellow and brown. A small red heart sits on the scroll, and the edges of other tattoos, including a rose and beaded lines, appear at the frame's sides.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bottle was once Lucozade, and I had to drink the lot before it would take a letter, which is how I ended up at quarter to three on a Sunday with a sore throat and a flat green bottle on the balcony rail. Mrs Okafor lent me a cork from her kitchen drawer. I folded this page four times, rolled it tight, and tied it with blue twine from the bin store, because a thing sent out ought to look like it means it.

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Dear whoever finds this, I live on the fourteenth floor of Ferrier Court, where the lift only works every other floor and the canal runs brown under the bridge, then goes silver wherever the sun catches it. I have not told anybody that I am lonely, so I am telling a bottle. The rose in the window box has come out pink again, the one Dad said would never flower in a flat. I tucked a petal in with the paper for luck, and I hope it survives the lock.

I threw it on Sunday evening and watched it turn over and over past the balconies until the dusk took it. On Thursday a boy from the flats by the towpath, all elbows with a football under one arm, came up the stairs and held it out to me like a fish he had caught. The cork had gone soft. He asked if I was the one on the fourteenth floor, and I said yes, and he said there was something on the back, then went red and studied the stairwell while I turned it over.

Underneath my own handwriting, in soft pencil, someone had written: Fifth floor. Bring the rose.

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