Black and grey shaded rose above flowing script lettering running down the calf, with scrolled line details beside it.

Rose and script lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded rose with layered petals sits at the top of the calf and fades into soft grey tones behind it. Bold black script lettering with looping ornamental strokes runs down the leg, with thinner scrolled linework beside it. The photograph is taken outdoors on a pavement, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Botanical Calf Rose Script Lettering Scroll Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bark only slips in late August, so that is when Walter Tanner wants his rootstocks budded, and it is when I am sent up the orchard ladder with a knife in my teeth and a roll of raffia in my pocket. Forty-two stocks stand in a row in the shade of the packing shed. Each needs a single bud cut from the old climbing rose on the south wall of the farmhouse, slid under the bark and tied off before the sap dries.

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Mrs Tanner labelled everything herself. Her capitals were joined and looping, the sort of hand they taught in convent schools when she was a girl, and every wooden tag carried its name in ink gone soft with damp. Most were apples: Bramley, Egremont Russet, Discovery. The forty-second tag had no apple on it. It said only Ada, the strokes swinging down past the edge of the wood, with a rose sketched beside it in pencil, its petals layered like folded paper.

I asked Walter what it meant. He took his pipe out and looked at the wall for a long time before saying it was the first rose she had ever grafted, the year before they married, and that she had never let anyone else take a bud from it.

I cut the bud that evening, a small green eye with a thread of wood behind it, and tied it in with the raffia. By September the graft had taken, a pale knot of new growth at the joint. Walter did not ask me to write the tag. He said Ada would want to do that herself, and he went up the path to fetch her tin of ink.