Black and grey traditional-style drawing of a rose above a banner reading LOVE, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose with LOVE banner design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of a rose in full bloom, with layered petals, a tightly curled centre and curled leaves at the sides, sitting above a ribbon banner that reads LOVE. The linework is bold and the petals are shaded with soft grey gradients against a dark grey background. The design is shown centred and in black and grey only, with no body part visible.

Traditional Rose Banner Love Leaves Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in closer, the lot of you, because the wind off the Skerry won't wait for anybody. You want the rose, then you'll have it the way my grandmother told it to me, on a night when every boat in the harbour was dragged up on the shingle and nobody could put out. There was a rose on the harbour wall in those days, a dark thing with petals stacked like wet slates and a tight curl at its heart, and the leaves at its sides turned over like the ears of a frightened dog. It grew from a crack in the stone where no soil had any business being.

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Morag Tulloch kept the lamp at the end of the pier, and her man Davie had gone out in the Ellen Ross two days before the squall came down from the north. She went to the wall every evening after she'd trimmed the wick, and she talked to that rose the way you'd talk to a neighbour over a fence. She told it about the price of paraffin and the gull that stole her bread. She never once told it she was afraid, because she thought a rose would know the difference. On the third morning she tore a strip from her Sunday ribbon, sewed the word LOVE on it in black thread with her teeth clenched, and tied it round the wall below the bloom.

The Ellen Ross came round the point at noon with her sail in rags and Davie standing at the tiller as if nothing had happened to him. The rose had opened overnight. Every petal was out, shining and grey in the wet light, and the curled leaves had lifted to hold the ribbon like a pair of hands. Morag swore to the minister the bloom had not been there the evening before, and he wrote it down, which was more than the rest of us ever managed. The ribbon is still on that wall, I'm told, faded almost to the colour of the sea, though you can still read the letters if you've a mind to stand close enough.