Black and grey line drawing of a rose branch with an open bloom, two buds and serrated leaves, in an engraved botanical style.

Rose branch with buds and leaves in line

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single rose branch is drawn with a large open bloom at the top, two smaller buds on the right and a bud on the left, plus serrated leaves and thorny stems. The linework is dense hatching and cross-hatching that builds shading in the petals and leaves. The drawing is set on a plain white background, with the stem curving through the centre of the composition.

Botanical Traditional Rose Rose bud Leaves Branch Stem Thorn Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came over the wall before the light did, so you were already out among the rose beds with the secateurs in your coat pocket and the lantern hooked on one wrist. Nobody else in Hollin Mere would cut in that cold. The old damask had been trained along the south wall since your grandfather's time, and its thorns were hard and curved like the tips of a cat's claws. They caught your cuff twice before you had made the first cut.

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There were three buds worth taking and one bloom that had gone too far. You knew which was which the way Mr Pell used to read his engravings, by the weight of the shadow under each fold. The big open rose, ruffled at the edges and dark at the heart, was for the vicarage table on Sunday, so you wrapped its stem in wet newspaper and laid it in the trug. The two buds on the right went after it, tight as knuckles, because Mrs Ashdown liked to watch roses open in a warm kitchen.

That left the bud low on the left, bent at the neck, its sepals still feathered with rime. You held the blades open over it for a long time. Then you did not cut. You took a strip of red wool from your pocket, tied it twice around the stem just under the thorns, and told the wall, out loud, that it was not to be touched until March.

When you came back in April the wool was still there, faded to the colour of old brick, and the bud had split along one seam into a pale green star. You stood in the wet grass with the lantern switched off and watched it for as long as the light allowed.