Black linework roses with leaves tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose cluster with leaves on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two roses in outline with several leaves sits on the side of the ribcage, with the face and head out of frame. The linework is dark and even, with the petals and leaf veins drawn in fine black lines and little shading. The image is in black and grey, set against a plain pale wall, with a navy top pulled up beside the tattoo.

Botanical Ribs Rose Leaves Flower Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Hollin Pass for three days when the landlady finally stopped pretending she wanted me gone. I was the only guest at the Coldharbour Inn that week, and the only one who noticed the roses. Someone had pressed two of them into the frost on the back window of the scullery, drawn in outline the way a child draws a flower, petals folded over petals, leaves curling off the stems like handwriting. Mrs Ashby said the glass had been that way since the autumn.

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Her husband had planted a rose bed beside the old well before he went to the war, she told me, and every summer the blooms were the colour of cheap wine. He never came back to cut them. She kept the bed clipped out of spite, or out of love, and she did not say which. On the third night the wind dropped and I went out with a lantern to look. The bed was buried, but the frost on the stone wall had grown the same two roses, drawn in black ink-fine lines, as if someone had traced them from the window and forgotten to lift the pen.

I found the ledger in the cellar, tucked behind the cider casks, with a pressed bloom between the pages from a summer I could not name. Each entry was a bill for a single rose, paid in full and dated every year, and the last one was for next spring. I sat with it until the lantern guttered. When I climbed back up, Mrs Ashby was standing in the scullery with her coat on, looking at the glass.

'He always paid in advance,' she said. 'I never did learn how to cancel.' Outside the snow began again, soft and even, filling the lines one by one until the roses were gone.