Line drawing of a wild rose branch with open blossoms, leaves and buds on tracing paper, with pale yellow and pink shading, as a botanical tattoo design.

Wild rose branch with leaves and buds

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a wild rose branch with a large open five-petal flower at the centre, surrounded by smaller blossoms, buds and several leaves on a long stem. The petals and leaves have fine interior vein and petal lines, and the stem runs diagonally across the sheet. Pale yellow and pink wash sits inside the outlines, while the drawing is set on a plain white sheet with a fingertip visible at the left edge.

Botanical Rose Flower Blossom Leaves Stem Bud Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had backed round to the north-east by the time we hauled the last creel, and Dennis was already swearing at the engine when I saw the rose on the harbour wall. It grew out of a crack above the slipway, a wild briar with five pale petals opened flat to the sky, as if it had waited all winter for the tide to turn. Nobody planted it. Mum said the birds dropped the hips there years back, and the mortar had given up just enough for the roots to find a foothold.

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We sold the catch at six for less than the diesel cost, and I spent what was left of my wages on a jar of rosehip syrup from the chandler's, which was a daft thing to do. Dennis laughed at me. He said a deckhand who buys medicine for his own cough is either sickly or soft. I told him the rose needed nobody's help, and that was the point of it.

The next morning the boat went out in fog so thick the gulls walked on the water. We found the buoy by sound, the bell clanking somewhere to port, and I counted the stamens in my head because counting kept me from thinking about the rocks. Eleven of them, ringed round a pale heart, the same number I had drawn in the margin of my logbook the night before. When the fog lifted we were a cable off the Hollow Stones, and the sun came through like someone had pulled back a sheet.

I cut a single stem when we came in and pinned it to the wheelhouse wall. It is still there, faded to the colour of weak tea, thorns intact. Each morning Dennis asks whether the thing has died yet. I tell him it has not. He says it's only a weed. I let him have that.