Black line drawing of a cross wrapped in a rose and leafy vines, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background with no body placement.

Rose and vine wrapped cross design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a cross with a large rose blooming at the centre of the crossbar, its petals drawn with swirled and layered lines. Thin vines with leaves coil around the upright and arms of the cross, with the shapes filled in white. The design is shown flat on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Cross Rose Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show had lost its big top in March and its elephant in April, and by the time the frost came into the Lincolnshire field there were only nine people left to feed. Old Tobias, the last carpenter, still had his saw, and he still had the cross. It stood at the head of the caravans where the ringmaster had planted it years before, two short arms and a tall upright cut from the trapeze bar of a company that had gone bust in Hull.

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A dealer from Leeds came out in a grey van and offered forty pounds for it, which was more money than the show had seen in a month. Ada, who walked the high rope and was owed three weeks' wages, said she would take it. Tobias only shook his head and said the rose came up through the wood every spring, and that a man who cut a rose out of a cross would find sap running in his boots. Ada laughed and fetched the saw herself. The blade bound in the grain at the crossbar, and when she pulled it free there was a smell like crushed fruit in the cold air.

She did not sell it. She sat up with a lamp that night and watched the vine move along the upright, slow as a clock hand, its leaves filling the white gaps in the wood. By morning a single rose had opened at the join of the arms, dark red and frosted at the edges, the only colour for miles.

The dealer's van turned around at the gate. The wagons went south one by one, and Ada drove the last of them. In the mirror the cross stood alone in the empty field with its rose lifting in the wind, and she left it there.