Black and grey tattoo of a shaded rose with lace-style linework and dangling ornaments on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded rose with lace detail on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose is the central subject, rendered with soft grey shading and fine detail in the petals. Black lace-like filigree and dotted hanging ornaments wrap around the rose and trail down the limb. The tattoo sits against pale skin and a plain white background, with the design framed centrally.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Joan,

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The new man at the Palais has put up a sign saying no lace on the floor after eight, which tells you everything about him. He doesn't know Mrs Abbott. She came in again on Saturday with her black lace cuffs and the little jet drops stitched along the hem, and when the band struck up the foxtrot those drops swung and chimed like a rosary counting out the bars. Nobody told her to stop. Nobody dares.

She still pins the rose at her collar, the pale one she cut from the back wall of the old vicarage the summer we were evacuated. She says the bloom outlasted the war because it was stubborn, and that is the only sermon I've ever heard her give. Ray Kellan asked her to dance twice last month and she refused both times, so he sulked by the cloakroom and bought her gin, which she left untouched on the piano.

I took a cutting from that rose myself on Thursday, while she was resting her feet. It is sulking in a jam jar on my windowsill, and there are two green shoots where there were none. I'm pressing one of the petals inside this envelope so you can see the colour. It is nothing like the photographs in the paper, but it is closer to real than anything else I've seen this year.

Come home at Christmas. Bring your good shoes. The band is awful but the lace is worth the trip.

Love, Vera

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