Colour tattoo of two red roses with dark leaves and a music staff with notes wrapping across a person's side ribs, shown in a close photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses and music staff on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two red roses with shaded petals and dark green-black leaves, joined by a curving music staff with notes that runs diagonally across the side of the torso. The roses are rendered with soft gradients and fine shading, while the staff and notes are drawn in clean black linework. Red ink dominates the roses against the skin tone, and the composition is a close, angled view of the flank with a navel piercing visible above.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Music staff Musical note Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano came up the stairs of number nine on a Tuesday, and it took four men, two ropes and a great deal of swearing before Walter Pryce could stand back and look at it. Someone had painted roses across its lid, deep red going to black at the edges, and wound a staff of inked music along the case as though the notes had been poured out and left to set.

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Nobody in Halifax could tell him who had played it last. The lid was warped and two keys were dead. Walter pressed middle C and it came back thin and sour, like a kettle left too long, and he laughed for the first time in a month. His daughter had sold the house on the hill and gone to Bristol without a forwarding address, and the piano had been left behind with a note tucked under its fallboard: Tune it, it's yours now.

He worked through the winter with a tuning hammer and a dish of rainwater, lifting felts and easing the wrestplank, following the staff on the wood as if it were a map. By February the rose on the left had stopped looking like paint and started looking like a flower someone had forgotten to pick. He played the first bar of an old hymn, got it wrong, and played it again.

On the last night he set the lid up and the room filled with a note that was almost right. Downstairs, the street door opened and a girl's voice asked whether anyone was still playing. He didn't stop. He had not expected an audience, and found that he did not mind one at all.