Hand-coloured flash drawing of a small winged figure perched on a large red rose with green leaves, in a traditional bold-outline style.

Winged figure on a red rose flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A small pale figure with a dark head and butterfly-like wings rests against a large red rose on a green stem with several leaves. The design uses bold black outlines, flat red, green and yellow fills, and some shading on the petals. It is set on a cream, aged background with visible cracks and fading, centred on the subject.

Traditional Botanical Rose Winged figure Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were told at the gate of Hollin Reach that the rose on the east wall had not been pruned since the old queen died, and that the thorns were the least of your worries. The steward handed you a sickle with its handle wrapped in tallow cord and walked you through the orchard without once looking back at the wall.

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The rose was the red of a pillar box in rain, its heart as thick as a turnip. Leaning against its outermost petal, arms folded like a clerk waiting for a fare, sat a small pale woman with a dark cap of hair. Her wings were striped yellow and black and edged in green, and when you stepped closer they lifted a finger's width, the way a cat's ears do before it decides whether to run.

She did not speak. She pointed at the stem with her thumb, then at the sickle, then at the sky, which was already going the colour of weak tea. You understood that the stem could be cut, but not before the bell rang for vespers, and the steward's shadow at the gate suggested he would not wait for a better explanation.

You did not cut it. You knelt in the wet grass until the bell stopped, and when you looked up she had climbed down the thorns to your boot and was sitting on the laces as if they were a bridge. Each spring after that a new rose came up on the east wall, smaller and paler, and the steward swore it had never been planted. You still keep one petal pressed in the back of the ledger, gone the colour of old paper, and when the light is low you can just make out a pair of wings beneath it.