Back of a person's neck with a tattoo of a red rose on a thorned stem, with grey shaded leaves, placed centrally at the nape.

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Red rose with shaded leaves on the neck

Botanical · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark hair pulled up, showing a tattoo of a single rose on a long thorned stem running down the centre of the neck. The rose head is filled with red ink, while the stem and three leaves are rendered in black and grey with soft shading and fine outlines. The plain white skin and black top keep the focus on the tattoo, which is centred in the frame.

Botanical Neck Rose Stem Thorn Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The briar at the wood's edge had been there longer than the church, Mother said, and nobody in Hollin Cross was allowed to cut it. We kept to the path beside it and lifted our skirts clear of the thorns. The year I turned seventeen, its one red bloom opened on the feast of St Agnes, while frost still silvered the ditches, and Tom Ashby came up the lane with his hat in his hands to ask my father for me.

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Father said yes to the cart and no to the wedding until the harvest was in. Tom walked me to the wood's edge every evening after that, and every evening the rose was a little more open, its red going dark at the rim like a bruise. I told him it was waiting for something. He laughed and said roses never wait, they just take their time over it.

On the night before the banns, I went out with the kitchen knife and cut the stem a hand below the head, where the three leaves begin. The thorns caught my wrist and I let them. I wrapped the bloom in my shawl and set it in the water jug on the sill, and by morning the petals had dropped one by one across the table, leaving only a bare cup and a single dark thorn.

Tom's cart had gone down the coast road before dawn with a widow from Sedgley beside him. I still keep the thorn in my apron pocket. The briar comes back every spring, three leaves to a stem, as if nothing had been taken from it at all.