Traditional style colour tattoo of two pink roses with green leaves, a bud and a curling stem on the side of a ribcage.

Two pink roses on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two pink roses sit on a connected stem with green leaves, a closed bud and a curling tendril trailing down the side of the torso. Bold black outlines define the petals and leaves, with pink and red shading that builds depth in the rose centres. The design runs diagonally across the frame on pale skin, with a dark garment at the top edge.

Traditional Ribs Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Garrow had kept the cutting in a jam jar on the lodge windowsill for three winters, and it had never once flowered, though she talked to it the way she talked to the coal man. Her brother Tom came up the lane in March with his boots full of rain and asked for it back.

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"It was Mother's," he said. "Her Albertine, off the wall at Brackenhurst." Nell said the wall had come down in 1961 and the rose with it, and that Mother had pressed the cutting into her hand the week before the hospital, so the claim was hers. Tom laughed at that and sat down anyway, and the kettle went cold between them while they argued over a stem no longer than a pencil.

He wanted it for his own garden over in Hebden. Nell pointed at the bud closed tight at the top of the stem and said it had been waiting all this time for somebody to stop pulling at it. Tom looked at the bud for a long moment, then at the three bent leaves and the sour smell of the water in the jar. He said nothing, which in their family counted as agreement.

In the end they planted it together at the foot of the lane fence, both of them on their knees in the wet grass. Tom pressed the soil flat with his palm and Nell tied the stem to a stake with a strip of her old apron. By June a single bloom had opened on the lower branch, pink at the edges and paler at the heart, and the bud above it never opened at all, which Nell said was the whole point. The thin green tendril had already gone round the fence wire twice, as if it meant to keep hold.