Drawn tattoo design of a skeletal ribcage and pelvis with a pink rose and a blue insect wing, in a realistic style on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage, pelvis and rose with blue insect wing

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn design showing a ribcage and shoulder blade above a pelvis, with a stem of pink rose and green leaves on the left and a blue insect wing with a segmented body on the right. The bones and wing veins are rendered in fine black linework with hatched shading, while the rose and wing are filled with flat colour. The design sits centred on a plain pale background.

Botanical Realism Ribcage Skeleton Spine Rose Leaves Insect Wing Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of June the rose had pushed through the gap under the back fence and into Mrs Abernathy's runner beans, and it was you who was sent to cut it back. The bush was old and pink as boiled sweets, its canes thick as a wrist. You knelt on the sacking with secateurs and a bucket, and the garden smelt of wet bark and the sour green of crushed leaves.

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The trouble started at the roots. Beneath the bed, where the hawthorn had been dug out in March, your trowel knocked against something hollow. It was a fox, or what the earth had left of one: a cage of ribs, a shoulder blade like a broken fan, and beyond them a pelvis the colour of weak tea. Mrs Abernathy said her husband had buried it there the winter before he died, and that the rose had gone in over it the spring after, because he'd said something ought to grow from a thing that had been loved.

A damselfly had settled on the bucket rim while you were kneeling there, its wings the blue of a gas flame. It did not fly when you lifted the bucket. It sat on the stem of a dried leaf and opened and closed its wings slowly, as though it were counting. You thought about telling her that the bones were still in the rose's roots, and that nothing in the garden would ever be properly tidy again.

You did not tell her. You cut the cane at the second node, bundled the thorny length against the fence, and laid the fox back in its hole under a handful of compost. The damselfly lifted off the rim and went over the wall toward the allotments. Mrs Abernathy came to the gate with a jug of squash and asked whether the rose had sulked. You said it had bloomed the same as ever.