Hand-drawn flash design of a red rose framed by black henna-style paisley leaves and a curling vine, with no body placement shown.

Red rose with henna-style leaves and vine

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a red rose with petals shaded in red and dark pink, set against a flower of pointed leaves filled with fine dotted and paisley-like patterns. A curling vine with smaller leaves of the same detailed pattern runs down the lower half of the sheet. The rose is coloured in red and the linework and leaf details are in black and grey on a pale background.

Botanical Rose Vine Leaves Paisley Mandala Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had gone grey on the back of the wage slip before Ruth Ansell noticed she had been drawing the same vine for an hour. Outside the kitchen window the winding wheel at Hollin Pit turned slow and dripping, and the coal lorries ground down the hill past the chapel and the washing lines strung with black work shirts. She had been copying the paisley leaves from her aunt's shawl, teardrops that curled back on themselves and filled up with tiny dots, like seed heads or the stars on a baker's apron.

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Her brother Danny had come home early with a bad shoulder and no word on when he would be back down. He sat at the table with his boots still laced, watching her pencil. "Put a rose in the middle," he said. "Mam always had roses." She shook her head, then did it anyway, a rose in the only red she had left in the tin of crayons the school had given up on. She shaded the petals with the pink from a broken lipstick, and the flower looked less like a bloom than a lamp someone had forgotten to turn off in a window.

The last shift was pinned to the notice board at the Co-op on the Monday, under a list of bus times nobody believed any more. Ruth took the drawing down there and left it on the counter beside the tea urn, expecting it to be thrown away.

By the end of the week the vine had been traced onto the backs of hands in the chapel hall, and the men coming up from the lamp room stopped at the gate to look at the red rose on the sheet of paper, then went home without saying much at all.