Pink rose tattoo in a stained-glass style with green leaves and the script words Tale as old as time, on the side of a torso.

Stained glass rose with script on the side

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pink rose with a dark outline and green, yellow and orange leaves and stem sits above the script words Tale as old as time. The rose and leaves are filled with segmented, panelled shading that imitates stained glass, with bold black outlines. The tattoo is shown close up on the side of the body, with the lettering set just below the design.

Ribs Rose Leaves Stem Script Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the moor has been listening at the arrow slits all morning and it wants this one for itself. You see that window up there, where the sky comes straight through the wall with nothing to stop it? That was the chapel glass. Every pane was a saint or a sheep or a farrier's boy, all leaded together by a glazier called Osric Penhale, who swore he could make a rose out of offcuts and nobody would ever tell the difference. Half the village laughed at him. The other half bought him ale so he would keep talking about it.

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The rose was not his idea. It was the Lady Ysolde's. She came up from the valley the winter her father lost the mill, and she asked for one pane to be left plain so she could sit in the light and count the threads of her own wool. Osric said he would make her a rose for nothing if she told him its colours. She said pink, the pink of a cut thumb before it heals, and green, and a yellow like the first sun on a sheep's back. He worked through a whole Lent on it, cutting each petal from scraps and grinding the edges with his teeth, or so his wife claimed. When the frame went in, the sun came through and laid the rose across the flagstones of the nave, and the old priest wept, and the Lady did not.

The castle fell in a bad year, the way castles do, one wall at a time while everyone was looking elsewhere. The Lady went down the valley road with a single cart and no glass in it. The glass stayed. Frost got into the leading, then the rain, and still the rose held its shape in the broken frame like it had been told not to move.

Every spring a single red bloom comes up through the rubble under that window, and the shepherds swear it is Osric, still trying to get the petals right. Mind the step. I have told you the whole of it, and the wind has heard every word.