Black and grey dotwork botanical tattoo of two wild roses, a bud and leaves on the side of the ribs, with grey lace underwear visible at the top of the frame.

Wild rose sprig on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two open five-petalled roses, one partly behind the other, with a small closed bud and several serrated leaves on a thin curving stem. The petals and leaves are outlined in bold black lines and shaded with dense stippled dots, giving a engraved, botanical-illustration look. The design is set against smooth skin on the side of the torso, with grey lace underwear across the top edge of the photo.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Rose Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp, because this is the part where Old Mags went out past the Greywater wall with a sack of cuttings and a dead man's spade. The hedges were gone by then. Nothing grew on the north side of the river but grey moss and the ugly yellow weed the drones liked to spray.

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She found the rose in a ditch beside a collapsed rail bridge, two bushes tangled through a fence of rusted mesh. Pink-white, five petals each, flat as a saucer, and the ground under them thick with the bees that were supposed to be extinct. Nobody had told the bees. Mags knelt there an hour, she always said, counting stamens with her thumb, and then she cut a single bud sheathed in red bristles and wrapped it in wet cloth against her belly.

The journey back took nine days. Twice the wardens stopped her at the gate and twice she showed them nothing but a pot of dirt and a grumble about her knees. Some say she kept the bud warm by sleeping on it. I say she didn't need to sleep on anything, she had the rose's own stubbornness in her.

Under the north wall, in the cracked yard where the old men played bowls, she planted it in a tin bath. By midsummer it had made a bush, by autumn it had hips like little lanterns, and the next spring the first green sprig came up through the concrete. And that, my darlings, is why there's a hedge along the Greywater wall again, so loud with bees you can't hear the drones.