Tattoo flash design of three dark red roses with black linework and a central script quote in an ornate frame, drawn on a cream textured background.

Three roses with script lettering flash

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

This drawing shows a tattoo design with three roses, each with dark red petals, black outlines and grey shading, and drips running down from two of them. The central script lettering sits inside an ornate black frame with flourishes, and the composition is balanced around the lettering. The palette is limited to maroon, black and grey on a cream, mottled background.

Lettering Botanical Rose Script Lettering Ornament Flourish Drip Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maggie had not expected the village hall to smell of the same floor polish, but there it was, sharp under the urn and the wet coats. Forty-one years since the Year Eleven leavers' dance, and most of the people at the trestle tables had kept their voices. Dean Pryce still laughed like a drain. Someone had set the name badges out in a biscuit tin, and she found hers at the bottom, MAGGIE in biro because the label printer had jammed in the school office, the same way it jammed for everything.

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She went looking for Jo Kettering without quite admitting it. Jo had been the smallest girl in the year, and the fiercest, the one who took a hockey stick off a prefect in the car park and held it like a sword until the prefect cried. Mr Hollis had made them read Midsummer that autumn, and when he reached Helena's lines about a little woman with a fierce heart, the whole class had turned to look at Jo, and Jo had pretended to be bored. Nobody had seen her since the summer she moved to Hereford, apart from one postcard of a rose garden that said only, Still here, still little, still fierce.

At half past eight the door banged and a woman in a green anorak came in, shaking rain off a paper carrier bag. It was Ruth, the younger sister, who had never once been at school with them but had always been the one who showed up at the back gate to collect her. She set the bag on the table and took out a jam jar of dark rose petals, pressed and dried, the stems wrapped in damp kitchen roll. A thin brown-red stain ran from the lid down the glass.

"She wanted you to have these," Ruth said. "She said you'd know what they were for."

Maggie took the biro from her pocket, peeled a fresh sticker from the tin, and wrote JO across it, pressing so hard the nib tore the paper.