Black and grey tattoo of a rose with script lettering across the lower abdomen, beside a hand holding a fan of dollar bills.

Rose and script tattoo on the abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a torso wearing a white crop top and blue jeans. A black and grey tattoo of a rose with shaded petals and scrolling script lettering covers the side of the abdomen, while a hand on the left fans out US banknotes.

Other Rose Script Banknote Money Hand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and take the end of the bench with the words cut into its back, for this one wants a bit of room. My grandmother's grandmother kept the rose garden up behind Calder Row, and in it grew one bush nobody else could get to take. Its blooms were black at the heart and grey at the edges, like a rose left out in the rain, and the bees would not go near it.

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A cloth merchant called Joseph Fenn came up the lane every Saturday with a fold of notes in his waistcoat and paid a shilling a bloom for the grey ones. Shilling by shilling the bush filled out. The petals went crisp and papery, the stems wound round each other like ribbon round a purse, and when the wind got in them they rustled like a pocket full of coppers. The old woman who tended the garden said the rose was only doing what it had been paid to do.

Fenn's wife found the words cut into this bench one morning, a name and then a word she could not read, the letters curled over like the tail of a sentence nobody finished. She begged him to stop buying. He laughed and bought anyway, and on the last Saturday of autumn he came up the lane with empty hands and a look on him like a man who had run out of pockets.

The old woman was waiting. She took the last note from his fingers, folded it small, and tucked it into the deepest bloom. The rose drank it down with a sound like a sigh, and the bush went quiet for the first time in forty years. Fenn walked home light as a feather, and the bench still says what it always said, if you know how to read a curl.