Pencil and ink drawing of a split ribcage and spine with a pink rose and vines on one side, and an animal skull with a moth wing below, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage, rose and moth skull design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a human spine and ribcage split down the middle, with one half fully skeletal and the other half overgrown by a pale pink rose, green leaves and trailing vines. Below the spine, an animal skull and a moth wing are drawn in fine black linework with hatched shading. The rose is coloured softly while the bones and wing are rendered in black and grey on a pale off-white background.

Botanical Ribcage Spine Rose Vine Leaves Skull Moth Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the stove, it spits whenever the wind comes round the north side. My grandmother's father farmed Hallow Bank above the Teme, and the winter of the flood he lost four ewes to the ditch and one to his own hand, which he never forgave himself for. He wouldn't leave the carcass in the field for the crows, so he hung her in the cart shed and took her apart a bit at a time, the way you'd unpick a jumper. The ribs he kept in a row on the shelf like a set of spoons.

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Then came the rose. His wife, Ada, had a climbing Old Blush against the south wall of the house, and that spring it found its way through the cracks in the cart shed boards and up the post where the spine hung. She said it was the only thing on the farm that had never once asked permission. By midsummer it had wound through the ribs, green leaves fat on the bone, and the pink blooms opened where the heart would have been. Nobody could bring themselves to pull it out.

The moths came in October. Big grey things, dusty as old wool, and one lay dead on the sill with its wings spread wide. Ada pinned it in the window to keep the draught out and called it the keeper. Every winter after, when the frost got into the rafters and the lambs were slow, she'd say the rose was holding the bones together and the moth was keeping watch. I never knew if she believed it. But the shed still stands, the rose still comes up every June, and I have never once seen it fail to flower.