Pencil and ink sketch of a tattoo design showing a woman entwined with a large rose and thorned vines, shaded in black and grey.

Woman and rose vine tattoo sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a stylised woman with flowing hair, her torso merging into a large rose with layered petals. Thorned vines curl around the figure, and a small bud with leaves sits at the upper left. The linework is bold and the shading is built from dense hatching and stippled dark areas, all in black and grey on a pale sheet.

Neo-trad Woman Rose Vine Thorn Bud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the walled garden for thirty-one winters, and in all that time the roses had never once bloomed out of season. So when a bud appeared on the south wall in the week after Candlemas, I took my trowel to it myself, meaning to cut it back before the abbot saw. The stem was green and sappy, and the thorns along it were fine as a cat's whiskers.

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The woman was there the next morning. I do not mean she walked out of the wall. She was simply there, her hair caught in the brambles, her face turned toward the chapel as if listening for the bell. Her body had grown up out of the centre of a great rose, the petals folded about her waist like a skirt of cold stone. Where her heart should have been, the petals were dark and speckled, the way wet earth looks after rain.

I told the prior, who told me to pray on it. I prayed, and the vine wound itself around my ankle while I knelt. Each night I found it had climbed a finger's width higher up the cloister wall, and each morning the woman's face had turned a little further toward the gate.

On the feast of St Gregory I opened the gate for her, which I suppose was the mistake. She stepped down onto the frost-bitten path without touching a thorn, looked back at the roses I had tended, and smiled as if she had been waiting for someone to finally ask her to leave. The brambles let her go. They have not grown back since, and the garden has never bloomed so well.