Black and grey dotwork rose with symmetrical leaves and a pointed tip, tattooed on the centre of a chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose with leaves on the sternum

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose in full bloom sits at the centre of a symmetrical design, with a pointed leaf-like tip above it and sprigs of foliage extending to both sides and below. The rose and leaves are outlined in bold black lines and shaded with fine stippled dots that build soft grey tones. The design is in black and grey on pale skin, with a pair of hands framing the top corners of the photo.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Rose Leaves Foliage Flower Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net comes over the gunwale heavy with wet weed, and you are reaching for the knife before Tom Pryor has finished shouting. Mackerel spill silver across the deck. Gannets wheel above the Ness, and you look up once, because the sky has gone the colour of slate and a single pale slit of light is opening over the headland.

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Your father taught you to mend net with a wooden needle and a hank of tarred twine. He taught you that a hole the size of a fist is nothing if you start at the edge and work inward. Your hands are quicker than his now. Mrs Harker, who keeps the loft above the chandlery, pays you a shilling a fathom, and she has started leaving a jam jar of dried rose petals on the sill beside the paraffin lamp, pink gone brown, because she says the sea air makes you look peaky.

On Thursday the wind swings north-east and the fleet comes in early. The Maid of Ellen misses the bar by a boat's length and her starboard net tears from stem to stern. You sit up all night on the upturned crab pots under the lamp, working the stitches by feel while the tide turns twice beneath the quay.

At dawn the holes are closed. When you lift your head, there is a fresh bloom in the jar on the sill, not dried but new, cut from the cliff garden and still wet at the stem. You tie off the last knot, bite the twine, and leave the needle where Tom will find it.