Pencil drawing of two shaded roses with a leaf, a rosary of beads and an ornate cross, a traditional-style tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Roses and rosary with cross

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two roses, one large and one smaller, with a pointed leaf above them. A string of rosary beads loops from the flowers and hangs down to an ornate cross with decorative ends. The roses and leaf are shaded in grey with bold outlines, and the composition is centred on a plain pale paper background.

Traditional Rose Rosary Bead Cross Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learned the rosary from your nan at the kitchen table in Cullan Bay, before you were tall enough to see over the oilcloth. Five decades to a bead run, she said, and you could count them with your thumb the way she counted fish boxes. Now the Marigold is four hours past the bar and the wind has swung north-east, and you are on the harbour wall with your hood up, working the beads by feel.

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The fleet comes in one boat at a time, the way it always has. Darren's engine first, then the twin-hulled Sarah Jane with her net torn like wet lace, then nothing for a long while. You count the Hail Marys against the lamps on the breakwater. Gull Kerr's wife stands beside you and says nothing, which is the kindest thing anyone has done all week.

When the Marigold's light finally shows, it is blinking wrong, a short then a long, the signal your father taught you for a boat with a sick winch. You stop counting. You go down the slick steps to meet her, the cross swinging against your palm, and the water below is black and slapping the stone.

Her skipper, Tom Ashby, hands you a crate of mackerel as if it were the only thing that mattered. You take it. Underneath the fish, wrapped in oilskin, is the small silver cross he has been meaning to give back since March. You never told him you'd lost it. Nobody on the wall says a word. You hold it up to the lamp and say the last decade out loud, all ten beads, for the men who came home and the one who is still coming.