Colour tattoo of a red rose with green leaves and dark blue script text on the side of a torso, shown on the ribs.

Rose and script quote on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A realistic red rose with pink and orange petals and green leaves sits on the side of the torso, with its stem curving down and to the left. Below and to the right, a line of dark blue cursive script reads as a three-line quote, with soft shading on the petals and clean linework on the lettering. The rose dominates the colour palette, and the photograph is taken close up with a hand resting at the top edge of the frame.

Botanical Lettering Ribs Rose Leaves Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, for the rose-walls of Corrowmere do not care to be talked about after dark. Every child in that kingdom knew Ansel Pim, the old gardener who grew one red rose against the south wall of the palace and no other. He kept its cuttings in a tin box with a cracked lid, and every spring he wrote to the queen in a hand so looped and blue that the clerks called it bramble-ink.

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The queen had no time for letters. She had a river to dam and a border to hold, so she sent back the same reply each year, folded small: Water your roses. Ansel never complained. He pressed a petal between the pages of the royal almanac and wrote a single line beneath it, which he would not read aloud to anyone, not even the cook who begged him for it over bread and dripping.

Then came the dry year, when every well in the valley went to dust and the palace lawns turned the colour of old bone. Only the south wall still bloomed, and the queen, who had never once walked her own gardens, came down in a grey cloak to ask why. Ansel was on his knees in the mud he had carried up by bucket. He did not look up. He only lifted the tin box and said the rose had asked for sun and a little tending, and nothing more, so that was all he had ever given it.

She opened the box herself that night. Inside were forty cuttings, each wrapped in wax paper and labelled in the same blue ink with the name of someone who had once left the city. The last label was blank. Beside it lay a folded letter addressed to her, unopened. She took the cutting, planted it in her own cold garden, and by morning the dust had settled and the wall was green.