Colour tattoo of two red roses with grey-shaded leaves and a music staff with notes across a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and music staff across the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo shows two red roses with dark grey shaded leaves, one near the shoulder and one lower on the side of the body. A music staff with drifting notes runs diagonally between the flowers. The roses use red ink with soft shading, while the staff and leaves are rendered in black and grey, giving a mixed palette.

Botanical Back Rose Leaves Music staff Musical note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, The galley has stopped rolling for the first time since Reykjavik, so I'm writing this at the steel prep table with the stockpot still ticking as it cools. You'll laugh, but I've been cooking to your scale exercises again. Every time the lid rattles I hear your E flat, and the onions come out better for it.

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Bosun Halloran found the staff paper I'd drawn on the back of the menu board, the one with the lines you ruled for me in March. He's a big man who says very little, so I was surprised when he came in with two red roses he'd nicked from the planters outside the Port Authority at Immingham and asked where a man could find a vase on a ship. We have one, the tin that used to hold the mustard. He pressed the stems into it and wedged it beside my notes, which had come unstuck and curled like smoke.

I told him the notes were all wrong. The crotchets are too heavy, and the rests look like fence posts. He squinted at the wall for a long while and said, 'They're going somewhere, aren't they?' I didn't have an answer, because they are. The little heads slant down towards the galley door as though the whole tune is trying to slip out before the kettle boils.

Send me the proper melody when you have it. I'll keep the stove warm and the tin of roses on the sill until we're back in the Humber, and then I'll hum it to you wrong on purpose so you have to correct me. Your brother, Tom.