Black and grey and colour tattoo on a person's upper back showing a yellow rose with green leaves, three black birds and the quote about the most poetical topic in the world.

Yellow rose, birds and quote on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo across the upper back, showing a shaded yellow rose with green leaves at the lower left. Three black birds in flight are placed around a black serif quote reading 'The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.' The rose is rendered with soft shading and the text and birds in solid black ink, against warm, dimly lit skin.

Botanical Lettering Back Rose Bird Crow Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the walled garden at Saint Ebba's on the fen edge, and in the thirtieth year of his keeping a single yellow rose came up against the south wall, where no rose had grown before. The abbot called it a sign. The infirmarer called it the soil. Brother Anselm said nothing, because he had seen the three black crows that sat on the bell rope each evening since Lent, and he had learned that crows only gather where something has already been decided.

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A girl from the village called Wenna brought bread to the gate that winter, and she was the handsomest thing the fen had produced in a generation. The old brothers swore the crows dropped from the rope when she passed and walked beside her down the causeway as far as the ditch. In March a fever took her, along with half the parish. The abbot had her laid out in the chapel with a yellow rose on her breast, and the crows sat on the roof beam and did not call.

Brother Hugh, the scribe, wrote in the margin of the herbal that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. The abbot struck the line through and told him the matter was not for ink. Brother Hugh said nothing back, but he sanded the page and kept it.

That summer the rose climbed the wall to the bell rope and bloomed out over the causeway. Brother Anselm cut one bloom each morning and laid it on the ditch stone, and each morning the three crows came down from the rope and took turns at it, one after another, until the petals were gone and the stone was bare.