Black and grey fine line tattoo of three roses with leaves and berries across the ribs, below the bust.

Three roses across the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A torso photograph showing a row of three roses with leaves and small berry clusters tattooed across the ribs, just below the bust. The roses have crisp outlines with soft grey shading on the petals and light stippled detail. The image is in black and grey, with a navel piercing visible below the tattoo and a grey sweater lifted above it.

Botanical Ribs Rose Flower Leaves Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the sky over Hackney Road had any colour in it, I was already elbow deep in the proving dough, and Mrs Okafor was already complaining that I'd put too much salt in the rye. She never said good morning. She said the oven was lying to us again and I should trust my hands instead of the dial.

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The roses grew in three stone pots in the yard behind the shop, one for each of my grandfather's daughters, and nobody had pruned them since the winter he died. In April they went wild, spilling over the wall into the lane. Every morning I cut three heads and floated the petals in the cold water we used for brushing the buns, a habit nobody had asked me to keep.

On the morning the council inspector came, the rye rose badly and the shutter stuck halfway up. I stood in the lane with a bucket of blooms and felt foolish. Mrs Okafor came out with her cardigan buttoned wrong, took one look at the tangled stems, and laughed for the first time since Christmas. "Your grandad would have charged a pound a bloom for these," she said, and pushed the bucket at me.

We sold the rose-water buns that day, and the inspector bought six, one for each of his nieces. When the last tray was empty I swept the petals off the step and found one still perfectly shaped, pale at the edges. I pressed it flat inside the lid of the flour bin, where I could see it every morning before the ovens woke.