Realism colour tattoo of a red rose with black rosary beads and a small cross wrapped around its stem, on the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and rosary on the side of the torso

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A fully coloured red rose with shaded petals and white highlights sits at the top of the design, with its green stem and leaves running diagonally down. Black rosary beads and a dark cross with small detailed beads hang from the stem, with soft green shading beneath. The image is a close, slightly angled shot of smooth skin, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Realism Other Rose Rosary Cross Bead Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rosary had been in my blazer pocket for twenty-six years when Maureen Doyle found me by the squash and sponge table at the reunion, holding a paper plate like a hymn sheet. She didn't say hello. She said, "You still have Sister Agnes's beads," and I felt the little cross knock against my hip through the trousers I'd bought for the occasion.

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Agnes had confiscated them from Maureen in the fourth year, mid-Latin, when the black beads were clicking under the desk like a telegraph. Maureen never got them back. I found them on the floor of the sixth-form common room the week after, a rose someone had pressed between two beads, its petals gone the colour of weak tea. I meant to return them. Then St Brendan's closed, the building was sold for flats, and the rosary went where I put things I couldn't quite throw away.

"She died in March," Maureen said. "They cleared her room and the nuns boxed up everything for the parish. I wanted to ask for those beads and they'd already gone to the bin." She looked at the centrepiece, a plastic rose in a jam jar, and then at my hand, which had found the cross without my permission.

I unhooked it there by the trestle table and gave her the beads, all of them, the thin green stem of the old rose still tangled in the chain. In the car park the evening was cold enough to see our breath. Maureen laid the rosary across the bonnet of her Fiesta, and the dried petal lifted off in the wind and went skidding under the wheel.