Pencil drawing of a shaded rose tattoo design with a swirling vine, hanging drops and a small rose with a yin yang symbol at the base.

Shaded rose with swirling vine and yin yang

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large open rose at the top, with a swirling vine that curls down the page and ends in a smaller rose containing a yin yang symbol. Thin dangling drops hang from the vine on fine lines. The rose and leaves are shaded with soft graphite greys, and the design is set on a plain off-white background.

Botanical Rose Vine Yin yang Drop Swirl Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the chair, love, the band is only resting its lungs, and I'll tell you about the rose that grew up through the floor of the Marigold Ballroom the winter the balcony came down. Nobody planted it. Old Tom Ferris swore it crept up out of the sprung boards like it had been waiting for music, a vine with leaves like pressed silver, and the drops hanging off its curls caught the lamplight so every dancer ducked under them on the way to the stairs.

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Ruth ran the cloakroom that year, and Walter Pyle played drums in the house band. He could not hold a tune to save his life, but he kept time like a clock in a church. Every Saturday he tapped his sticks on the rim while she hung up coats, and every Saturday the vine had grown another curl down the banister. She noticed the little rose first at the bottom step, its petals tight as a fist. Walter had pressed a pebble into its heart, split black and white like the tide meeting the sand, and he told her that was the two of them: one half dancing, the other half waiting for the next beat.

Then in March the band was called up and the ballroom shut its doors. Ruth kept the cloakroom key on a string round her neck. When the men came to strip the place, they pulled the vine off the stairs in long brown ropes, but at the foot of the banister the little rose sat unbroken in the dust, and the pebble was still there when they lifted it.

So I still go down on Saturdays, turn that pebble over in my palm, and wait for somebody to start counting.