Colour tattoo of a pink rose with green leaves inside a circular frame, with the script words Tale As Old As Time arching above it, on a person's upper back.

Pink rose in a ring with script on the back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A pink rose with green leaves and a dark outline sits centred inside a circular frame that has a pale pink, faceted border. Handwritten script reading Tale As Old As Time arches across the top of the ring in fine black lines. The soft pink, green and black ink sits on warm skin, and the photograph is taken close up and straight on.

Lettering Traditional Back Rose Ring Leaves Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the rain has stopped but the gutters on Caldew Row are still talking to themselves, so I'm writing this at the kitchen table with my coat still on. You'll think I've lost the plot, but I went back to Pell's pawnshop tonight, the one with the bell jar in the window, and the rose was still there. Pink silk gone soft at the edges, standing in its little brass ring as if it were waiting for a train that stopped running years ago.

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Pell let me hold it. He said the man who pawned it had come in every March for eleven years to ask whether it had sold, then stopped coming altogether. The shop radio was playing an old song about a tale as old as time when the rose came in, and Pell said he's never been able to hear that song since without sitting down on the nearest crate.

I bought it for two pounds fifty. The ring was bent, so I paid nothing for that, and I carried the whole thing home under my jumper like contraband. Halfway up the hill the lamp outside the chip shop caught the glass, and for a second the petals looked lit from inside, which is nonsense, I know, but I'm telling you anyway.

Come Saturday. There's a key under the bakery mat and a spare cup in the cupboard above the sink. I'll put the rose on the windowsill facing the street, where the oven light from downstairs reaches it around four in the morning. You can tell me then whether I was being daft.