White ink tattoo of two roses and symmetrical scrollwork across the upper chest and shoulders, in a botanical style, with the face cropped out of frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink roses and scrollwork on chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the upper chest and shoulders of a person, with the neck and head cropped out. Two roses sit on the shoulders, with a central symmetrical design of curling scrolls and leafy flourishes spreading across the chest. The linework is light and fine, rendered in white ink that stands out softly against the skin tone, and the composition is centred and evenly balanced.

Botanical Chest Shoulder Rose Scrollwork Flourish Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want to sit down for this, because Mrs Abbott never told it standing, and she'd not thank me for telling it wrong. The Gull House stood at the top of Tanner's Steps in Saltcombe, and every room had a ceiling that someone had dressed up in plaster. Her husband Frank did the work, the ornamental kind, roses at the corners and scrolls that curled out like the tendrils on a sweet pea. He'd learned it from his father, who learned it from a man who'd done the Assembly Rooms before they burned.

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The trouble came the winter Frank went down with his chest. There was a lodger, a young man from Leeds with a sketchbook and no money, who offered to finish the cornice in the back parlour in exchange for his board. Frank lay upstairs listening to the scrape of the trowel and swore the boy was ruining the symmetry. Every evening he'd climb the ladder with a rag and a candle and check that the left-hand scroll mirrored the right, and every morning he'd find the boy had already made it so.

Come spring, Frank was up and walking, and he stood in that parlour with his hand on the wall and could not find a single crooked line. He said it was the best work in the town. Then he looked closer and saw the boy had drawn the roses in white paint over the cream, so faint you'd only catch them when the sun came low through the bay. Frank asked him why white. The boy said, so they're only there when you look properly.

Frank never painted over them. When the Gull House was sold after the war, the new owners stripped the walls but left that ceiling, and they say on a bright evening the roses still hold the light, pale as salt on a window. Mrs Abbott used to point up at them and tell the lodgers, mind your heads, because the good work is always the bit you have to stoop to see.