Small black and grey traditional rose tattoo with a thorned stem and two leaves, placed on the neck behind the ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small rose tattoo behind the ear

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small rose in bold black outline, with its stem, thorns and two leaves, sits on the skin behind the ear. The petals are shaded with fine stippled dots and the stem and leaves use solid black lines. The photograph is in greyscale, with hair and an ear piercing visible around the tattoo.

Traditional Botanical Dotwork Neck Rose Stem Leaves Thorn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had come over from Bideford in a biscuit tin, wrapped in wet sacking, and Mrs Pennock swore it would not survive a single winter on Gull Rock. She was wrong about that, as she was about most things, but she was right that it needed minding. Every morning I carried a bucket of rainwater up the iron stairs and tipped it at the roots, then climbed back down to wind the clockwork that turned the great lens.

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The thorns were the worst of it. The stem grew straight up the wall of the store, sprouting spines like a cat's back, and it took me three summers to learn to cut it without bleeding over the logbook. Mrs Pennock said a rose that hurt you was a rose that meant it. She had been married to the keeper for thirty-one years and was not one for sentiment, so I did not ask what she meant.

In February the sea came over the rock in a grey wall and took the bucket, the tin and the two leaves that had hung on through the frost. When it drew back I went out with the lamp still humming behind me and found the stem snapped and lying in the gulls' wrack, one bloom still tight and dark at the top.

I wired it to the rail of the gallery and let the wind have it. Mrs Pennock watched from the doorway with her hand flat against the frame. "Well," she said, "it was always going to be a short-lived thing out here." Then she went inside and put the kettle on, and I saw her wipe her eyes on the tea towel before she came back out.