Black and grey tattoo of realistic roses and a swirling vine running down the side of the ribs.

Roses and swirling vine on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three shaded roses, one at the top and two lower down, joined by a long curling vine with bold black linework and small leaves and buds. The roses are rendered in soft grey shading with highlights, while the swirls are solid black lines with varied thickness. The design runs diagonally up the side of the torso against a plain light background, with the subject's dark waistband visible at the bottom.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Vine Swirl Bud Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the wind has got under the canvas tonight. So the Marvello tent had one pole left standing, and a vine had climbed it the way vines do when nobody is minding them. Old Hester Crane kept the ticket booth and the wagon with the peeling lettering, and every spring she went up the pole with a pair of shears to cut the bindweed back.

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Her husband had planted the first rose there the summer they married, a dark red thing the lions kept nibbling at. By the year the circus was sold for scrap, the roses had gone grey, the way everything in the ring went grey once the lamps were turned down to save oil. Hester said it suited them. Grey roses don't ask you for anything.

Then one morning a boy from the next town came to the gate with a sack of cuttings and no money. He said the roses in the old photographs looked like they were thinking, and he had never seen any that did. Hester handed him the shears and told him to leave the bud at the top alone, because it was the last one that would open before the frost.

He cut carefully. The vine came down off the canvas in long loops, and by the end of the week the whole pole was dressed in green and grey. Nobody came to see it. That was the point, Hester said, and she laughed the way a gate hinge laughs. The roses were for the people who climbed up close enough to look, and there were only ever two of those, and one of them was her.