Forearm with a colour traditional rose and star, a grey deer framed by flowers, and the words Don't let me drown in black lettering, with a thigh tattoo visible below.

Rose, deer and lettering on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The forearm carries a colour traditional-style rose with a yellow star centre and teal leaves, a grey shaded deer with antlers set among flowers, and black lettering reading "Don't let me drown". A black-and-grey linework design, possibly a figure with flowing hair, sits on the thigh. The ink mixes pink, teal and yellow with grey shading against a pale granite floor.

Traditional Lettering Botanical Forearm Thigh Rose Star Deer Flower Leaves Lettering Heart Antler

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and hush, because the water in Halden Mere was never in a hurry, and that is the whole trouble with water. It came up over the church roof one wet spring and kept coming, quiet as a cat, until the lanes were fish-roads and the orchard was nothing but a row of crooked tops poking through.

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A hind called Sorrel came down to the shore that spring with her ribs showing and her hooves sore from the stones. On the bank stood one rose bush that had no business surviving, its pink head open like a cracked plate, a yellow star at its heart and leaves the green-blue of a kingfisher's back. Sorrel asked it plainly, "Where is the ford?" The rose said nothing, being a rose, but a single petal lifted on the wind and dropped onto the water, and the water took it under.

So she waded out to her knees, and the cold went up her like a bell being struck, and she said the only prayer a deer has, the one her mother had said on the high moor: don't let me drown. The rose heard her. It had been waiting for someone to ask. It let go of its footing on the bank and sent its roots down through the silt, hooking into the old mill wall one stone after another, until there was a path under the brown water as straight as a sentence.

Sorrel crossed with the water to her belly and came out on the far side shaking. When she looked back the rose stood alone in the flood, half its leaves gone under, its star still bright. Some say the bank fell in the winter after. I say the petals went downstream and each one found a child who needed a bridge. And if you stand on the stone ford at dusk, with the flowers pushing up through the cracks, you can hear the water say, quite politely, that it is still not in a hurry.