Two women seen from behind sitting at the edge of a pool, one with a sleeve on her arm and ornate tattoos on her buttocks, the other with rose tattoos across her back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two women with back and arm tattoos by a pool

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two women sit side by side at the edge of an indoor swimming pool, photographed from behind. The woman on the left has a dense tattoo sleeve on her arm and ornamental designs on her back and buttocks, while the woman on the right has rose and floral tattoos across her upper back and shoulder. The ink appears predominantly dark grey and black against bare skin, with the pool water and tiled edge filling the background.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Back Other Woman Rose Floral Sleeve Ornamental Back tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had found its way through a crack in the lido wall the spring after they drained the pool, and by June it had climbed as far as the diving board. Nobody planted it. Edith Pask, who had cleaned the changing rooms for thirty-one years, said it was the sort of rose that comes up where something has been let go, and she said it while pinning a cutting to the back of her cardigan like a brooch.

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She took the cutting on a Tuesday, before the council men came with their hoardings. The stem was dark, nearly black in the shade, and the leaves had a grey bloom on them like pewter left out in the rain. Edith wrapped it in a damp tea towel and carried it up the hill in her shopping bag, past the bowling green and the bus shelter where the adverts had been peeled away, to the allotment her brother had kept until his knees gave out.

She grafted it onto a briar that autumn. Her brother watched from a deckchair with his tin of bitter lemon, saying nothing, which for him was approval. Nothing came up the first year. The second summer she nearly gave up, then one morning in July a single bud opened the colour of the water at the deep end, a cold blue-green that had no business on a rose, and its petals were edged with the same dark grey as the stem.

She carried the first bloom down to the lido in a jam jar, though the gates were chained by then. She pushed it through the wire fence into the empty basin, where it dropped onto the tiles and lay there, still wet, beneath the clock that had stopped at twenty past four.