Black and grey traditional-style drawing of a straight razor resting across a rose with leaves, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Straight razor and rose flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and grey wash drawing of an open straight razor lying diagonally across a full-blown rose with several pointed leaves below. The bold black outlines and smooth grey shading create highlights and depth on the blade, handle, petals and leaves. The design is shown on a plain off-white background with a faint grey wash behind the razor.

Traditional Rose Leaves Petal Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The razor had hung on its nail above the basin in the back room of Halloran's for thirty-one years, and nobody had shaved a face with it since the old man's hands began to shake. Ruth Pemberton swept the floor under it every Thursday night after the last customer left, and every Thursday she looked up at it the way you might look at a sleeping dog.

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The night the rain came off the Mersey sideways, a boy knocked on the glass of the front door with a fist wrapped in a bloodied scarf. He was seventeen, maybe, and he had come from the docks with a broken jaw and no money, and he asked for nothing except a place to sit where the lamps were warm. Ruth made him tea with three sugars and did not ask what had happened. She took the razor down anyway, because her father had always said that a blade in a barber's hand was a promise to be kind, and she wanted him to know there was a promise in the room.

She did not shave him. She opened the blade and turned it under the lamp so the steel caught the light, then laid it on the counter beside a single rose she had cut from the yard that afternoon. The petals were still wet. The boy looked at the razor, then at the flower, then at her. Outside, the tide was coming up the steps. Ruth folded the blade shut and said, in the voice her father used for customers who had nowhere else to go, that the rain would ease before dawn, and that she would wake him when it did.