Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and curling vines running down the ankle and lower leg, shown with a white peep-toe heel.

Rose and swirl vine tattoo on ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three rose heads stacked down the leg, linked by a thin curling vine with leaves and scrolling swirls at the top. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft grey shading on the petals and a few sharp highlights. The design runs vertically from the lower calf to the ankle, and the person wears a white platform heel against a dark carpeted floor.

Botanical Ankle Rose Vine Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the cutting of a rose from your grandmother, who kept three bushes behind the chapel in Tirion Row and never once let the coal dust settle on them. She told you roses grow fat where the ground is poisoned, and you took it for one of her sayings until the winter the colliery closed and the only green thing left on the hillside was the pit pond's scum. You are fourteen. Your brother Idris has a tin of Woodbines he has not yet been brave enough to light, and he is sitting on the chapel wall swinging his boots at the sky.

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You take the cuttings anyway. You wrap them in a wet tea towel and carry them down the valley road inside your coat, and the wind keeps trying to tear the bundle out of your hands. Idris walks beside you counting the lamp posts that still have bulbs, because he says that is the only way to make the walk feel shorter. At the bottom of the row, where the terraces meet the river, you find a yard nobody has claimed, a square of broken slate with a wall that still holds the sun in the afternoons.

You plant them on a Sunday. The first bud comes out the colour of an old penny in April, and by June the stems have found the drainpipe and begun to climb it, curling into little scrolls where they are unsure of the way. Your grandmother would have told you that is how roses behave when they are given a wall to lean on. You stand in the yard with dirt under your nails and your brother's cigarette finally lit beside you, and you let the smoke go up past the roof, where something green is still reaching for the light.