Colour traditional tattoo of a woman in profile wearing a red rose and gold coin headdress, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile portrait with red rose headdress

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A woman in profile wears a large red rose and a headdress strung with gold coin-like discs, with a red scarf and patterned fabric below. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with the face and skin areas shaded softly. Red, gold, ochre and muted green dominate against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the rose before you learn the woman. Every Monday there is one on the third-floor landing of Kestrel House, a red bloom laid on the lino beside the bin chute, its stem wrapped in a strip of kitchen foil. You have swept it up for six weeks, and for six weeks it has come back, fresher each time, as if the building holds a grudge against your broom.

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The caretaker's office is where you find out who is leaving them. Mrs Okonedo on fourteen sends her grandson down with a biscuit tin whenever the lift breaks, and this time the tin holds a string of old brass discs, each one stamped with a worn sixpence face. She says they came from a wedding in Lagos in 1962 and she wants them out of the flat before her knees give out. She asks you to take them to the pawnshop on Queen Street. You say you will, and you don't.

Instead you carry the tin up fourteen floors on a Sunday, past the mural of a heron somebody painted over twice, and find her on the balcony with the rain coming in sideways. She looks at the tin, then at the foil stuck to your sleeve, and laughs until she has to hold the rail.

Then she tells you the rose was never for the landing. It was for the bin chute, where her husband used to drop his bus tickets, so the building would have something red to remember him by. You stand there with the tin in your hands while the wind takes the last of the petals down the shaft.

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