Black and grey botanical tattoo of leafy vines curving down either side of a woman's spine, meeting three shaded roses on the lower back.

Rose and leaf vine tattoo down a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large tattoo of leafy vines running down both sides of the spine. The vines curve inwards at the base of the back, where three roses are drawn with soft shading. The fine linework and grey shading are set against bare skin and a dark, softly lit background.

Botanical Back Vine Leaves Rose Spine Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell kept her narrowboat, the Thrift, to the middle of the cut and never let the towpath ivy reach her gunwales. Her husband Tom had painted roses on the cabin doors the year they married, and the paint had faded to a grey that looked like pencil. When he died in the hard winter, she took the Thrift up through Stanhope lock alone, with the tiller under one arm and a coil of rope over her shoulder.

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At Stanhope the lock-keeper, a boy called Eli Marr who had grown tall since his first season, came down to help her with the gates. He looked at the cabin and said the roses had gone soft. Ada told him that was what roses did when nobody minded them. He wanted to know what she meant to do about it. She said she meant to reach Skipton before the frost, and that a boat was not a gallery.

That night she tied up under the bridge at Gargrave and sat on the step with a tin of black paint and one brush. Tom had always drawn the leaves first, a stem and then the small pointed leaves running up the wood like a ladder. She did it the same way, down both sides of the cabin, until the two lines came together at the stern and bent inward. Then she drew three roses in the space they made, shading them with water so the grey would sit deep in the grain.

In the morning Eli was on the towpath with his hands in his pockets, reading the boat. He said the roses looked as if they were holding something up. Ada said they were holding the boat together, which was what Tom had intended, and she untied the rope and let the Thrift drift out into the pale light.