Black and grey tattoo of a shaded rose, a small bird and leaves above a banner reading Mom and Dad, on the side of the ribs.

Rose, bird and Mom and Dad banner on the side

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey rose sits at the centre of the design, with a small bird perched above it and leaves and scrolling swirls around the base. A banner beneath the flowers carries the words Mom and Dad in script lettering. The photograph is taken close up and straight on, with soft lighting across the skin.

Botanical Lettering Ribs Rose Bird Leaves Scroll Banner Mom Dad Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last field before the sale was a wet one outside Hereford, and Dad spent the morning trying to raise the big top with a borrowed spanner and a flask of tea gone cold. Mum had already gone up to the horse lorry to count straw bales, as if they might multiply if she looked hard enough. I sat on the step of the Rose Wagon with Pip in his brass cage on my knees, because nobody else would take him and I had promised Mr Okafor I would keep him out of the draught.

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The wagon was the oldest thing we owned. Grandad had painted the rose on its side the summer before the war, grey shaded like a photograph, with green and black curls swirling round the wheel arch. Above the flowers a small bird sat on a thorn, the one detail he never felt was right. Under everything, in gold leaf flaked to the colour of old teeth, the banner read ELSIE AND FRANK. Pip sang at the paint all morning as though he could hear it.

The man from the scrapyard arrived at noon with a clipboard and a van with no name on the door. He walked round the wagon twice, tapped the rose with his biro, and said the metal was worth more than the paint. Dad said nothing. He went to the cage, unhooked the little door, and held out his hand flat. Pip hopped onto his finger, looked at the rain, then shot up through the open flap of the tent and circled the poles three times before settling on the wood above the wagon door.

"He'll come down when he's hungry," Dad said, and the man laughed and wrote something down. Pip did come down, eventually, but only as far as the hedge, then the next field, then somewhere past where we could see. By evening the van had gone with the wagon chained behind it. I kept the empty cage. It still smells of seed, and some nights I think I can hear him singing at the paint.