Black script reading Tale as old as time runs across the fingers of a hand, with a small pink rose and green stem below it on the back of the hand.

Tale as old as time script and rose on hand

Lettering · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a hand with the words Tale as old as time written in black cursive script across the fingers. Below the lettering is a pink rose with a green stem, leaf and a small red detail, drawn with clean outlines. The soft white fabric background keeps the focus on the tattoo, with mixed black lettering and coloured botanical linework.

Lettering Botanical Hand Script Quote Rose Flower Stem Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the gravel, it's loose by the sundial. My grandmother used to say that every rose on this wall was once a girl who talked too much at the wrong hour. It's a tale as old as time, that is, and I'll tell it the way she told it to me, with the bees listening.

Keep reading

There was a sexton's boy called Ambrose Tull who came up the lane with a barrow and a hand-saw in the spring of the great frost. The squire had shut his walled garden thirty years before, and wanted the old orchard wall cleared. Behind the broken bricks Ambrose found one rose climbing the stone, pale pink as the inside of a shell, with a stem green as pond water and a single red bud like a drop of sealing wax. He pulled the bindweed from its roots and never once touched the rose.

Every evening after that he carried water from the pump and sat on the bench to tell it the news of the village: who had wed, who had died, which dog had stolen the vicar's gloves. A rose has no ears, you understand, but it has patience, and patience comes to the same thing in the end. Each evening it opened one more petal.

When the squire came to see the wall finished, he found a clean path and an empty bench. The boy was gone, and so was the rose, though the bricks where it had climbed were still warm from the afternoon sun. In their place was a small red bud pressed into the mortar, and tucked beneath it a letter in Ambrose's hand, folded very small, saying he'd gone to the sea. Now that's the end of it, and the bees will tell you the rest if you ask them nicely.