Black and grey traditional roses with bold outlines and leaves tattooed in a row across the stomach, above the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three black and grey roses across the stomach

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Three roses with bold black outlines and leaves are tattooed across the stomach, just below the ribcage. The petals are filled with soft grey shading and deeper black accents, giving the flowers depth. The composition is centred on the midriff, with the person wearing a white top, a black waistband and denim jeans.

Traditional Other Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third week out of Gravesend, the biscuit tin on the galley sill was the only thing aboard I trusted. Inside it, wrapped in wet sacking, were three rose cuttings my grandfather had taken from the wall of his cottage in Deal. I had promised him the salt wouldn't get at them. Cook called me soft. Bosun Harker called me worse, because he had caught me at four in the morning kneeling by the tin with an eyedropper of rainwater.

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Harker kept his own roses on a tea caddy in his bunk, black and grey, painted by a man in Hull who had once been a sign-writer. Three blooms with leaves crowding underneath, as if they were sheltering from the weather. His mother had given it to him the year he first signed on. A rose keeps the cold off better than wool, he told me, and I didn't believe him, but I liked that he thought it.

The cuttings went black in the Doldrums. I woke one morning to the tin smelling like a churchyard, threw the lot over the rail, sacking and all, and cried in the scullery where nobody could see. Harker found me there with a cup of stewed tea and said nothing about it. Two days later he came down with a sprig of green from his own caddy and showed me how to strike a stem in a jam jar of seawater, which is not how anyone should do it, but it took.

We made Gravesend on a grey Tuesday. Grandad was at the gate in his good cap, and I put the jar in his hands before he could ask anything. A single leaf had come out of the stem, small and furious green. He turned it to the light for a long time, then said it would need a proper pot, and that the tin had always been too small for anything worth keeping.