Side of a torso showing a realistic red rose and black lace tattoo running down the ribs, with black and white rose design panels on either side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses and black lace on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of the left side of a torso with a tattoo of several red roses linked by black lace-like scrollwork that runs vertically from the ribs towards the hip. The roses are shaded in red with dark tones and highlights, while the lace is rendered in fine black linework and dotted detail. Two black and white line drawings of the same rose and lace design flank the photograph.

Botanical Realism Ribs Rose Lace Scrollwork Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Crowe pricked the last rose pattern by the stove while the snow buried the lower field. Her father's dyer had sent a skein of madder-red wool that would not take in cold water, so she had warmed the pot twice and still found streaks of pale in the thread. The lace was her grandmother's craft, learned in Honiton and carried north in a tin box of bobbins, and it ran in a scroll down the paper sleeve like a vine looking for a wall. Where the pins wanted to sit, she set roses, each one costing her a whole night and a little of her eyesight.

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Her brother Sam wanted the lot sold to the grain merchant in Crediton before Candlemas. He said the rent was owed and the sheep were eating the hay faster than the weather would let it grow. On the third day the merchant came up the lane with his boots iced to the ankle. He lifted a rose from the cloth between finger and thumb and turned it to the window. Did the red come from the wool or the flower, he asked. Neither, Ada said. It came from the hedge in June, when she had sat with a jar and a spoon and a great deal of patience.

He paid for the length of lace and nothing for the roses. Ada understood then that a thing made by hand is priced by its bones, not its bloom, and she let him take the cloth without argument. That evening she cut the roses free, one by one, and stitched each to the lining of her mother's black coat, where they lay against the wool like a row of embers. Sam found her at the table with the scissors still warm, and she told him the rent would be paid by spring, which was a lie she meant to earn.