Bold black tribal-style rose design with a curved stem and two leaves on a white background, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement.

Stylised black rose with stem and leaves

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a rose in bloom, with its petals drawn as sweeping, pointed shapes, sitting atop a long curved stem. Two leaves extend from the stem, one to the left and one to the right, with no shading or fine detail. The design is shown in pure black on a plain white background, centred and filling most of the frame.

Rose Stem Leaf Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gates of the Saltmarket were chained at ten, but Mabel Greaves had never once been locked out of it. She knew which railing would give under a shoulder and which gutter ran warm from the bakehouse. At half past two she was up on the wall above the canal with a flat knife between her teeth, cutting the one black rose that grew out of the brickwork, the only thing in the city that bloomed in February.

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Nobody had planted it. The old watchmen said it came up the year the cotton mill burned, through a crack where the mortar had gone soft, and that its stem bent like a hook so it could keep hold of the wall. Its leaves curled at the tips like swallows' wings, and the petals were sharp enough that Eli Corran, the lamplighter, once bled from pulling a cutting for his mother's grave. Mabel did not pull. She worked the knife under the root until the stem came away in one clean curve.

She carried it across three bridges to the narrow house on Tanner Row, where a candle had burned in the upstairs window every night since her brother went to sea. The sash was open. Someone had left a cup of milk on the sill, skinned over and cold, and beside it a letter folded into the shape of a boat.

She did not read the letter. She stood the rose in the milk and sat on the step until the lamps went out one by one along the canal. When the last one died she heard a hull knock twice against the quay, the way a boat knocks when the tide has turned and somebody is finally coming home.