Pencil drawing of three shaded roses with leaves, buds and thorny stems, shown as a black and grey botanical tattoo design.

Three roses with thorny stems

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of three open roses clustered together, with two rosebuds, several leaves and dark thorned stems. The roses are rendered with soft graded shading and fine linework, and small dew drops sit on the petals. The design is centred on a pale grey background with black and grey tones throughout.

Botanical Realism Rose Rosebud Leaves Thorn Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The petrol station at Kell Junction sold diesel, bottled water and one bucket of roses that Mrs Abernathy kept alive out back with a hose and a grudge. My van gave up outside her gate the summer I was twenty, and she paid me in tea and lessons. She showed me how to cut a stem just above an outward-facing bud, so the cane would not die back into the wood, and she made me say the names of the varieties until I could say them in my sleep.

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The dew was the only water those bushes got before the sun cleared the ridge. Every morning at five she sent me down the rows with a torch clenched in my teeth, counting drops on the petals, because she said a rose with dew on it had decided to stay another day. Three bushes by the back fence were her favourites. They had all grown from one cutting her husband carried across the border in a coffee tin, wrapped in a wet sock, and she would not let anyone else touch them.

The road crew came in the spring to widen the highway. The bulldozer took the fence first, then the three bushes, then most of the bucket of roses that had been waiting by the pumps. I found her sitting in the dust with the coffee tin in her lap. She did not mention the roses. She asked whether I had counted the drops that morning, and I had not. I had been thinking about my van.

We drove out before noon with the tin rattling on the dashboard. The windscreen had a faint film of moisture from the cooler night, and I counted the beads on the glass as the sun came up over the ridge, one, then another, until the heat burned them off and there was nothing left to count.