Colour traditional-style rose tattoo with red petals, green leaves and bold black outlines, shown on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional rose with green leaves on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stylised rose sits at the centre of the design, with red petals divided by black lines and a pale green and yellow centre. Dark green leaves and small yellow buds with stems radiate outwards around it. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Traditional Botanical Calf Rose Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose came up through the flagstones of Hollin Cross the spring after the mill closed, and nobody planted it. Old Mrs Ferrier said it had been waiting under the stones since the Dutch sailors drowned off the point, and she said it the way she said most things, as though it were settled and no one had thought to ask her.

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Its petals were the red of a boiled sweet, and the black lines between them were the lead cames of the chapel window, which had gone to the scrap man in 1951. The leaves were dark as bottle glass. Three yellow buds hung on wire stems, and the children counted them each morning to see whether any had opened.

Harold Penny, who ran the wireless shop, wanted it dug out and sold to a garden centre in Settle. He came with a spade on a Tuesday and cut one trench. Then he stood over the middle of the bloom, where the pale green centre held a coral dot like a held breath, and the spade went back into the van without his having decided anything.

They say it still blooms on the first frost, and that the buds open only when someone in the town says a true thing aloud in the square. Harold kept the wireless shop until he died, and the spade rusted in the van. The rose kept coming up, one bud a year, always on the first frost, and Mrs Ferrier knitted on the wall beside it and never once looked surprised.