Black and white flash design of an open coffin filled with roses and leaves, drawn in bold blackwork style with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open coffin with roses and leaves

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold graphic drawing of an open coffin in side view, filled with large rose blooms and leaves. The linework is thick and solid, with white negative space forming the petals and hatched shading on the leaves. The image is monochrome black ink on a plain off-white background, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Coffin Rose Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses had been growing in the old coffin since the spring the river turned salt, and nobody in Harrow Lock had the heart to tip them out. It was the only box in the valley that still held water. Mab Oriel's grandmother had sealed its seams with pitch scraped from a dead engine, and when the rains came the lid kept the sky out and the soil kept its damp, so the bushes climbed over the rim and let their hips fall over the edge like coins.

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A tinker came up the north road in the hot month with a cart of tins and a mule that would not stop coughing. He stopped at the coffin and asked what fool had planted roses in a box meant for a body. Mab was pulling thistles from the beans. She said the body had been put under the cress beds years back, and the box had been too good to bury, so it had been kept for something living.

He offered her a clean jar of water for one cutting. She said the cistern gave enough and the roses were not for sale. He tried again with a knife that had a bone handle, and she still shook her head, so he went off up the road muttering about stubborn women and salt.

That night she lay awake and heard the stems creaking in the dark as the buds swelled. In the morning the first bloom had opened on the lip of the lid, white as a tooth against the black wood. She cut it and set it on the table where the tinker's knife had lain, because it seemed a fair thing to leave behind.