Black and white photo of a hand with a traditional-style rose and leaves tattooed on the back, with silver rings on the fingers.

Rose tattoo on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a hand clenched near a leather jacket zip. A large rose with leaves covers the back of the hand, drawn with bold outlines and dark shading. Small tattoos also appear on the fingers, and silver rings, including one with an animal head, sit on the fingers and knuckle.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Coldharbour House has been broken since March, so you take the stairs with the rings in your coat pocket, counting landings the way your nan counted rosary beads. Mrs Okafor on the eleventh floor offered forty pounds for the silver ring with the wolf's head, the one her husband brought back from Almería before the factory shut. You told her you'd bring it up. You did not tell her it had already gone to a man on the market stall who wanted it for his son's birthday.

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On the ninth landing the stairwell window is cracked in a star, and the streetlights below look like something spilt. You think about Dom, who got the rose drawn across the back of his hand the summer you were both nineteen. The artist told him roses had to be heavy, bold black lines and dark shadow, or they'd blow away in the wind off the car park. Dom never took the rings off. He said they weighed the hand down so it didn't reach for things it shouldn't. You used to think that was daft.

The man on the market wants forty-five for the ring now. You pay him, because a promise is a promise even when it's made by someone who wasn't yours to make it to. You climb back to the eleventh floor with the ring warm in your fist. Mrs Okafor opens the door before you knock, sees the wolf's head shining in your palm, and shakes her head slowly.

"Keep the forty," she says. "He sold it to me first, you know. Forty years ago. I bought it back from him in the car park." She closes your fingers over the silver, one by one, the way you'd close a hand around something that might fly off.

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