Two roses tattooed on the side of a torso in black and grey shading with red accents, sketchy linework and soft smudged shadows.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Two roses sit one above the other on the side of the torso, the upper bloom smaller and angled towards the top right. The petals are built from bold black and grey shading with loose, sketchy outlines and faint trailing strokes around them. Red edges and highlights run through the petals, and the skin around the tattoo is plain and lightly lit.

Botanical Ribs Rose Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maren burned oak for the lime kilns above Harrow Wold, and every spring the fields behind her hut came up grey where the ash had been spread. Nothing grew in it but thistle. Then one March a bramble shoot pushed through the black ground with two buds on it, and she knelt in the cold and watched them open slowly, the petals dark at the centre and rimmed with the colour of a fresh ember.

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The village priest said roses did not grow from spent wood, and the miller said it was a trick of the frost. Maren said nothing. She cut the flowers and carried them down to the market at Ellesford, where a bridle-maker's wife paid a copper for each bloom and asked no questions about the smell of smoke that clung to the stems.

Her brother Tobin wanted the roses for himself. He had married well and had a house with glass windows, and he came up the hill one wet evening with a knife in his belt and a grin that did not reach his eyes. He reached for the nearer bloom. The stem bent, and the petals went soft and black in his hand like paper in a grate.

He stood a long while in the rain, staring at his palm. Then he went home and never came up the hill again, and Maren went on cutting, and the roses came back every March, one a little higher on the slope each year, until the whole wold was blotted with them and nobody in Ellesford could remember what the grey fields had looked like before.