Black line drawing of a woman in a headband with curly hair, framed by two open roses and an arched border of circles, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-style line drawing shows a woman wearing a headband, with wavy hair falling to her shoulders and one hand raised near her chest. Two large open roses with leaves sit at the lower left and lower right, and a faint arched outline with a row of circles runs across the top. The linework is bold and even in black on pale paper, with no shading or colour.

Neo-trad Woman Headband Curly hair Portrait Rose Leaves Arch Circle Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Scarra the wind came round from the west on the ninth night after the boats went out, and Mairi Gow sat up with the lamp lit in the arched window. She had set nine white pebbles along the sill, one for each moon since Tam had sailed, and each dusk she moved one into the palm of her hand so she would know the count without having to think about it.

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The laird's agent came up the track that week with a ledger under his arm. He said the cottage was owed to the estate for the winter, and the roses that climbed its wall were to be cut and sent to the mainland with the fish, since the mainland paid well for flowers that had no business growing in salt. Mairi told him the roses had been planted the spring her daughter was born, and that they would stay where they were. He wrote something down and left the ledger open on the table.

On the ninth night she took the lamp down to the shore with a bundle of cuttings wrapped in wet sacking. She knelt where the tide turned and said plainly to the water what she wanted: the boats back, or else a fair count of what had been lost, and she would pay the difference in roses. The sea took the bundle without a sound. By morning a line of foam had been drawn up the sand to her feet, and in it lay a brass ferryman's ring that had been Tam's.

The agent did not come back for the rent. The boats returned at the next full moon, all but Tam's, and Mairi went down to the slip with her hands empty and the ring on a cord at her throat. She put the last pebble back on the sill that night and left the lamp out, and in the morning the roses on the cottage wall had opened in the frost, every one, as if the count had been paid.