Black and grey roses and an ornamental cross across a woman's chest and shoulders, with colour tattoos on her forearm and hand, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and ornamental cross chest tattoo

Botanical · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A woman wears a black shawl that leaves her chest and shoulders partly bare, showing a large tattoo of two shaded roses flanking a central ornamental cross panel. The rose and scrollwork linework is bold, with grey shading, and her left forearm and hand carry denser tattoos with some colour. The composition is centred on the chest tattoo against a plain grey wall.

Botanical Neo-trad Chest Shoulder Forearm Hand Rose Cross Ornament Floral Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when the carter came stamping into the Lantern at Scarth, and Hanne Vell put down her ladle to ask him where a man found roses in January. He took off his hat. Two blooms, pale as candle wax, were tucked in the band, and their stems were still green.

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He said he had them from under the chapel wall at Holm, where a cross stood over the lych gate and a rose bush had grown through its base. Nobody had planted it. The old folk said it bloomed only when someone in the valley was going to be carried across the snow to a warm hearth, and that a cross keeps what it is given. The carter had not believed a word, and he said so, but he had taken the roses anyway because the bush had bloomed for him and no one else was there to see.

The inn was full of people who could not leave: a tinker with a bad knee, a midwife called Ada, a boy who would not stop asking about the roses. Ada said the bush was half a mile up the road and the lantern would last if no one dawdled. Hanne took the lamp and the knife and went out. The snow came to her thighs. Under the chapel wall she found the bush, bare as wire except for a single bud, and she cut it, and cut a second that she had not seen until she brushed the drift away.

She wrapped them in her mother's altar cloth, which had a cross worked in its corner, and carried them back against her chest. In the morning the pass was clear and the carter was gone. On the inn sign, where the old lantern hung, someone had pinned the two roses under the iron cross, and neither of them had wilted.