Black ink script tattoo running down the spine of a woman seen from behind, with a shaded rose on her upper arm.

Vertical script down the spine with a rose

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair pinned up is photographed from behind, showing a long vertical line of thin black script running down the centre of her back from the nape to the waistband of her denim shorts. A shaded black and grey rose sits on her upper arm, and a small mark is visible near the base of her neck. The ink is black and grey throughout, against warm, softly lit skin and a neutral indoor background.

Lettering Botanical Back Upper arm Script Rose Text Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire won't keep itself going and this is the part that needs the warmth. You've walked past the old birch at the forest's edge a hundred times, I'd wager, and never once read it. Lift your chin and look. Those marks run the whole length of the trunk, root to crown, and every one of them is a name.

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Hannah Quill had the steadiest hand in Little Wending. She kept the parish register and wrote letters for anyone who couldn't, and when the first ships went out in the spring of the wet year, she sat under that birch with a pen and a pot of ink and wrote the names of the men who had gone. Nobody asked her to. She did it because the register sat in a locked drawer and the birch stood open to the weather, and a tree, she said, keeps what it's given.

The ink dried black on the pale bark, but the thin lines took the rain badly, and by midsummer half of them had blurred to grey. Hannah went back each morning with a brush of soft hair and a little more ink, and each morning the wild rose at the roots had opened one petal wider, though nobody had planted it. The old folk said it was the rose from the garden she'd left behind when she came to the village. The young ones said it was just a rose.

When the last ship came home, Hannah was the one who counted the names on the trunk, and there was one more than the register held. She never wrote it down. She left the space blank, and the birch, they say, still keeps it open for whoever comes back.