Black and grey rose tattoo with script lettering across the lower back, shown on a person in black bikini bottoms.

Rose and script lettering on lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the lower back and sides, with a large shaded rose and foliage behind a flowing script line reading Stoned Bitch. The shading is soft and grey, with dark outlines and highlights on the petals. The close crop focuses on the tattoo against a blurred outdoor background.

Lettering Botanical Back Rose Flower Foliage Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey rose came up in the third bed behind the potting shed, the year after my father's glasshouse flooded and he stopped speaking to Mr Oakshott across the lane. Nobody had planted it. It simply arrived between the lavender and the wall, its petals the colour of wet slate, and it opened in shadow when every other bloom in Hollin Row had shut for the evening.

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Father would not have it cut. He said a rose that refused the sun had nothing to teach a gardener, and he wrote its name on a seed tin in his tidy copperplate: Ghost of Hollin. Mr Oakshott came round for it in October with a bottle of sloe gin and a pair of secateurs, and the two men argued over the cuttings for an hour on the back step while I held the lantern and listened to the rain drip off the lean-to roof.

They took three cuttings each. Oakshott's rooted; ours went black at the stem by Candlemas. I found the tin in the spring, and under the lid a folded note in my father's hand that said only, Grow it where it's looked after. I understood he meant the other garden, the one across the lane that had gone to nettles when Oakshott's wife died.

I carried the surviving cutting over the hedge on a Sunday with the gin still on my breath. Oakshott was on his knees in the nettles. He looked at the bloom in my hand, then at the grey petals catching the low light, and said, well, it always did prefer the shade. We planted it together before the dew came down.