Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses and the French words vivre pas à pas on an ankle and foot.

Two roses and French script on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two rose designs sit one above the other on the ankle and top of the foot, with a small rosebud and leaf to the side of the lower rose. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with grey shading in the petals and a few unshaded highlights. Below the lower rose, thin script reads vivre pas à pas, and the bare foot fills the frame against a pink towel.

Botanical Lettering Ankle Rose Rosebud Leaf Script French text Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite had the knife in one hand and a bud-stick in the other when the bell over the shop door clanged for the third time that night. She didn't look up. Grafting wants a steady wrist and a held breath, and the rootstock on the bench had already been cut twice that evening by her own clumsiness.

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Upstairs the lamps of the Croix-Rousse were going out one by one, window by window, while the city below kept up its low hum of trams and wet tyres. Her uncle had always said a rose takes a year to forgive a bad cut. He had chalked the words above the bench in his looping hand: vivre pas à pas. Live step by step. She had thought it was a motto for the tourists who bought his cuttings in paper cones.

She worked on the second rose after the first had taken. The stock was a wild briar from the riverbank, thorny and stubborn, and the scion was a pale pink bloom he had grown from a cutting the summer before he died. She bound the join in waxed thread, then bound it again because the first wrap had slipped. Outside, a delivery van idled and moved off.

By dawn both grafts held. She set the pots on the sill where the streetlight fell across the leaves, sat down on the stool, and let her hands rest open in her lap. Nothing about the joins looked finished. They were only green swellings against the stems, the sort of thing a sensible person would throw away. She left them anyway and went downstairs to put the kettle on.