Black and grey drawing of a traditional rose with shaded petals and outlined leaves, shown as a tattoo design on white paper with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional rose design with leaves

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of an open rose in bold black outline, with a cluster of three outlined leaves at the lower left and right. The petals are shaded in grey, with darker tones in the folds and lighter highlights on the outer curves. The rose is centred on a plain white background.

Traditional Botanical Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who keeps the hydroponic bay on Tallis Reach, and after eleven years you have stopped noticing the smell of wet iron and something sweeter underneath it. Your work is the rose bed under the fourth lamp, a row of grafts that began as cuttings from a bush nobody aboard remembers planting. Ines ran the bay before you. Her ledger lives in the drawer under the nutrient pumps, and its last entry is four words long: outer petals greying. Keep the dark in the folds.

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The shift bell rings early on the morning the bloom finally opens, and the hull ticks like a kettle left on the hob. You kneel by the bed with the magnifier hooked to your collar and count the leaves. Three at the base, serrated, every vein drawn in a line so black it seems to sit on the air rather than in it. The centre petals have unfurled only halfway, curling outward like the lip of a cup someone has just set down, grey at the edges and shadowed where they fold back on themselves.

Somewhere above you the passengers are asleep in their pods, dreaming of rain on a planet none of them have seen. None of them will ever smell this. You think about the shears on their hook and the observation deck with its big cold window, and you leave the shears where they are. Ines would have wanted the bloom to finish its own turning, and the air is thick enough now that you can almost forget the pumps humming below.

You open the ledger to her last page and write beneath her four words: still open. Then you turn down the lamp, check the seal on the bed, and go to fetch the water.