Black and grey tattoo of two shaded roses on a vine with the script Life goes on, running down the side of the ribs.

Rose vine with script on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A vine tattoo runs vertically down the side of the ribs, with two shaded roses and their leaves on a curling stem. Above the upper rose, the script Life goes on is written in a fine cursive. The linework is bold and the roses use soft grey shading, and the photograph shows the tattoo against bare skin with a white top lifted above it.

Botanical Realism Ribs Rose Vine Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rambler had been dead to the root for two winters, Margaret said, and still Dennis went out each February with the secateurs and the old cut-back saw, as if the garden owed him a conversation. He worked along the south wall of the cottage at Hollin Fold, lifting the brittle canes off the brick one at a time and stacking them on the path where the cat liked to sit. The roses had gone in the spring their daughter left for Canada, two bushes in a tin bath of Norfolk clay, and he had never once asked what they were called. Margaret knew. She had written it on a plastic tag in biro, and the tag had long since rubbed blank.

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On the third Saturday, while he was levering out the last root of the eastern bush, he found a shoot. It was low down, almost level with the flagstones, where the frost had never quite reached under the bricks. Pale at the tip and no thicker than a bootlace, it had folded itself into a curl, like a question mark somebody had started and then thought better of. He knelt on the wet step for a long time with the trowel across his knees. Then he fetched a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer and scraped the soil away from it with the care of a man lifting a letter from the bottom of a drawer.

Margaret brought out two mugs of tea and stood at the gate with her hand on the latch. He did not tell her what he had found. He tied a length of green twine to the trellis, looped it loosely around the curl, and let the shoot lean out towards the warm bricks. By evening the tip had already turned, reaching for the light the way the old canes once had, and a single leaf had unfurled beside it, grey-green and creased like a thumbprint.