Colour rose and grey linework hand tattoo on a person's lower left leg, with legs resting on a car dashboard and a camera in the lap.

Rose and hand tattoo on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a healed tattoo on the outside of a lower leg, showing a red and pink rose near the top and a grey linework design beneath it that appears to include a hand or skull-like form. Teal and purple shading sits behind the rose and along the lower edge of the design. The leg is shown from a casual angle inside a car, with a camera and a visible wristband in the frame.

Calf Rose Hand Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Clatterbridge dug a grave on a Tuesday, so when the sexton's boy came running up the lane with his cap crushed in his fist, Miss Hester Vane already had her gloves on. She took the spade from the shed, its bone grip worn pale by her grandfather's hands, and walked down past the chapel to the water meadow where the old damask rose climbed over the churchyard wall.

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The rose was older than the wall. Its roots had gone under the stones and come up on the far side, and they gripped the mortar the way a hand grips a rail on a steep stair. Mrs Tully, who had sold eggs in the market for sixty years, said the rose took one name each generation and kept it, and that was the price of the red flowers in June. Hester had heard the story as a child and had never believed a word of it, but the boy's mother was on her knees by the water, and the river under the bridge had gone the colour of old jade in the failing light.

Hester cut a cutting from the rose's lowest branch and wrapped it in wet sacking. At the water's edge she pressed it into the cold mud and said to the bush, plainly, that the boy's name would be kept in her own mouth from now on, and that she would say it every morning at the gate until she died. The wind dropped. A moorhen crossed the shallows and the reeds stood still.

In June the old rose flowered as it always had, but beside the river a thin stem she had not planted put out two blooms, one deep red and one pale as milk. Mrs Tully's eldest left a loaf on the chapel wall that week, and Hester found it still warm when she came down to say the name.