Black and grey skeleton hands holding flowers and leaves, tattooed on the side of the ribs and torso.

Skeleton hands and flowers on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a torso lying on white bedding, wearing a black lace bra and black waistband underwear. Two black and grey tattoos sit on the side of the ribs: a skeletal hand holding a cluster of flowers and leaves, and a larger skeletal hand with fingers spread above it. The shading is soft and the linework is fairly fine, with the flowers shaded in grey tones against the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had been up since four, wiring peonies and stripping thorns from the roses on the back trestle, and by the time the bride's mother came in asking for a spare buttonhole she had a bucket of white stock going limp at her feet. The wedding was at St Oswald's, then the marquee by the river. Nothing about it was strange except the order sheet, filled in by hand in a looping script she did not recognise, asking for "the bones of the hand, to hold the bloom, as Grandmother asked."

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She didn't understand it until the morning of the wedding, when she found the bouquet already made on the workbench. The shop bolt was still across the door. The stems were wound in damp moss and tied with grey ribbon, and each bloom sat in the gap between pale finger bones, wired so neatly the joints looked grown rather than assembled. The flowers were fresh. Their petals had the bruised softness of things cut an hour before.

She drove the bouquet up the lane herself. At the lych gate the bride took it, and her knuckles brushed Mags's, warm and ordinary. She laughed at the little bones and said her gran would have adored them. Mags said nothing about the order sheet, and nothing about the stock she had never bought.

Back at the shop the workbench was bare except for a card in the same looping hand. Thank you, Margaret. You always did hold things together.

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