Pen and ink tattoo design of a rose, ribcage, spine and pelvis with a blue insect wing, drawn in a botanical anatomical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, ribcage and blue wing anatomy design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a rose with green leaves and stems on the left, a ribcage and shoulder blade on the upper right, and a pelvis with a spine running down the centre. A blue insect wing extends from the spine on the right, with a small insect body and legs visible. Fine black linework and stippled shading define the bones, while the rose and wing carry the only colour on a cream background.

Botanical Rose Ribcage Spine Bone Anatomy Insect Wing Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Chancellor wanted the assembly finished by Midsummer Vigil, and so Tamsin Ferrow sat at the long oak table in the Cabinet of Vell with a spool of brass wire, a bowl of cold tea, and the bones of a hound that had died in the palace kennels the winter before. The ribs came from the infirmary's bone-house, yellowed and sorted by the physician's clerk. The pelvis she had cleaned herself, scraping the last grey lichen with a horsehair brush until it sat pale as chalk in her palm.

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The rose was the difficult part. Brother Ansel had pressed it in the herb garden that spring, a double bloom of the old crimson kind that the queen had loved and the gardeners were forbidden to pick. Tamsin laid it against the spine where the shoulder blade would hold it, and the petals kept their shape better than she expected. The mayfly had come up from the southern marshes in a sealed jar, a creature that lived one day and had been kept alive by the apothecary for a full season out of spite. Its wing was the blue of a kingfisher's back, and when the lamp caught it, the veins looked like river mapping.

She worked until the bells rang for matins, wiring the vertebrae and sliding the insect's body onto a thin rod that ran beside the spine. The wing kept lifting. Each time she fixed it, it caught the draught from the window and turned, as if it wanted the harbour rather than the frame.

At dawn she unlatched the casement and let it go. The mayfly rose over the roofs of Vell with its blue wing bright against the grey sky, and the Chancellor, arriving at the door with his silver ledger, found only the cream-coloured card, the small bones held in their brass cradle, and a single crimson petal lying on the empty place where a heart might have been.