Two hands show matching traditional red rose tattoos with green leaves and bold black outlines on the backs of the hands, with lettering on the knuckles.

Red roses on both hands

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two hands are held together, each showing a large red rose with bold black outlines and green leaves on the back of the hand. The petals are filled with solid red ink and shaded with black near the centres, giving a classic flash look. Colour dominates the image against the grey clothing and concrete background.

Traditional Hand Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer turns the tin over twice before she opens it, as if the rose might be something else underneath. Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper, is a cutting no longer than your forearm, stripped of leaves at the base, with three buds left at the top like a closed fist. 'Plant material,' she says. 'You know what the regulations say about plant material.' You do. You have read them on the coach, on the ferry, in the toilet at the services outside Calais, until the words stopped meaning anything.

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You tell her about the wall at the back of your nan's house in Ashford, the red climber that dropped petals onto the coal bunker every June. You tell her the variety has no proper name, only the nickname your cousin gave it, Ruby Fist, because it pushed through any fence you put in its way. She is not really listening. She is looking past you at the jug of supermarket carnations on the desk by the window, and then at the tin, and something in her face loosens for a moment before she catches it and sets it straight again.

She picks up her stamp and presses it onto your form with a flat, decisive thump. 'Cut it on a slant,' she says, sliding the paperwork back across. 'Keep the end wet. Don't let it sit in the sun.' Her voice has changed, gone quieter, and you understand that she has grown roses too, somewhere a long way from this desk.

By October the cutting sits in a jam jar on your kitchen windowsill, and it has put out roots like white thread. The three buds have opened one at a time, each one redder than the last, and every morning you move the jar a little further into the light.