Traditional style flash drawing of a woman's head with a red rose and green leaves in her dark hair, shown on a cream background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional woman's head with red rose

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A painted drawing of a woman's head in profile, with dark swept-back hair, heavy eyeliner and red lips. A red rose with green leaves sits in her hair above her ear, and the neck and shoulder fade into the cream paper. Bold black outlines define the forms, with flat red, green and skin-toned fills and small highlights on the eyes and rose.

Traditional Woman Portrait Rose Leaves Hair Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo Halloran had painted roses on card for thirty years, and he knew the difference between a rose that would sell and one that would sit in the window until the paper yellowed. The one on the easel by the back door was the second kind. Too many petals, he thought, and the stem lost in the leaves like a wire in a hedge. Dolly Ferris, who ran the Commercial Road parlour and took her tea black, had told him flash should be readable from across a pub.

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Dolly came through the beaded curtain at half four with a sailor's kit bag and a face like a closed shutter. "Your rose is sulking," she said. "Give it to the girl who's coming Saturday. She wants a flower in her hair, nothing grand."

Mo laughed, then didn't. He cut the green from the tin, thinned the red with a drop of water, and let the paint dry in the gaps between his fingers. By dark he had a rose that opened toward the window, its leaves pinned back as if a breeze had caught them, and a black line down the stem that he traced twice to be sure of it.

On Saturday the girl did not come. Dolly sent word that the bus had broken down outside Chatham and the sailor meant to carry her bag had shipped out without him. Mo pinned the sheet to the board anyway, rose turned toward the door, and left the lamp on for her until the kettle went cold.