Traditional style tattoo of a pink rose with green leaves above the lyric How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All in a scrolled black cartouche, on a lower leg.

Pink rose and quote on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bold pink rose with a yellow centre and two teal-green leaves sits above a black scrolled panel that carries the words How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All. The rose uses solid colour with dark shading at the petal edges and heavy black outlines, while the lettering is in clean black linework. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a soft floral fabric background.

Traditional Lettering Calf Rose Quote Scroll Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marquee smelt of wet grass and someone's cigarette, and the vicar had already lost the ring twice when you reached the buckets at the back. Mrs Okafor had ordered forty pink roses from a wholesaler in Spalding, and thirty-eight had survived the drive. You chose the two with the sharpest petals, the ones that deepened to a darker red at the edge, and trimmed their stems on the hall step with your dad's penknife.

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Your brother wanted the bride's bouquet to carry a card with a line from the book they had read aloud on every long drive since university. He had written it in capitals on the back of a bus ticket, and the words had gone soft at the folds. HOW STRANGE IT IS TO BE ANYTHING AT ALL. You tucked the ticket into the ribbon, and the bride, who had never once in ten years been on time, caught your wrist and asked whether you had seen her shoes.

Later, when the band had packed the amps and the lanterns had burned down to their wicks, you found the ticket on the grass under a folding chair. Someone had trodden on the petals beside it, leaving a pink smear across the capitals. You shook it dry and read the line again by the light from the kitchen door.

In the morning it was still folded in your jacket, the ribbon gone limp, and the rose you had kept back for yourself had turned the colour of old brick. You pinned it to the corkboard by the kettle anyway.