Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two roses with leaves, shaded with stippled dots, on a limb of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses in dotwork

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows two roses, one partly open at the upper left and a larger bloom in the lower right, joined by stems and leaves. The petals and leaves are outlined in fine black lines and shaded with dense stippled dots that build up the depth and volume. The image is in black and grey only, with the tattoo centred against pale skin.

Dotwork Botanical Other Rose Leaf Leaves Flower Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first rose came over from the mainland in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a wet sack, and the boatman swore on his mother that nothing green would take root on Skerrow. Ellen planted it anyway in a crack of the headland behind the lamp house, where the spray could reach it on the bad days. Her father said salt would kill it by Candlemas. It did not die. By midsummer it had put out three leaves and a bud the size of a thumbnail, and Ellen was carrying bailed rainwater up the path twice a day in a pail with a split handle.

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The second rose she bought off a tinker with two good eyes and one bad. Her father said that was the first foolishness and the second would be worse. She set it a stride from the first, and when it came into flower the older bloom had already dropped its petals on the rock, and the new one, bigger and paler, opened over the top of it like a hand cupping a candle.

That autumn the fog came down thick for three nights, and the lamp burned orange and useless through it. On the third night the Mary Lowe came in toward the reef with her sails black against the grey. Ellen could see nothing from the lamp room, but she knew the rock by heart. She climbed out on the gallery with a lantern, then went down the path to the roses and held the light where the pale bloom was. The boat turned. Her father said afterwards it was the lamp that saved them, and Ellen let him say it.