Traditional-style tattoo of a wreath of yellow roses with red centres and dark teal leaves on black stems, wrapping around an elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow rose wreath on an elbow

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A wreath of yellow roses with red centres and dark teal leaves sits on a black stem that circles the elbow. The roses and leaves are outlined in bold black linework and filled with flat, solid colour, with little visible shading. The image shows two photographs of the same tattoo side by side, and dark tattoo work is partly visible at the top left and bottom right edges.

Traditional Other Rose Wreath Leaves Stem Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road over the pass was shut three days in every ten, and Maren had walked it anyway with a basket of salt fish on her hip. Below the saddle, where the snow thinned into grey shale, the old well stood inside a ring of yellow roses. Their stems were black and thorned and bent into a circle the width of a cart wheel. The goats would not graze inside it, and nobody in the valley could say who had planted it.

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Her brother Tobin said the ring was a wedding gift. A bride had crossed the pass in midwinter to join a man on the far side, and she never arrived, so he planted roses around the place where the wind had found her, to keep it off the next traveller. Maren thought this was the kind of tale men told to sell mules. Still, she slowed when she reached the well, as everyone did, and it was there that the storm caught her.

She crouched inside the ring with her back to the stones. The snow came sideways and piled against the thorns but did not reach her. Something moved in the leaves beside her knee, a dark coil with a pale diamond pattern down its back. It rested its head on the shale and looked at the fish. She thought about the mules and the bride and the cold in her fingers, then tore off a strip and set it down. The adder took it slowly and went back under the roots, and the storm, having nothing else to do, blew itself out before dark.

In spring she came over the pass again. The roses had opened, dozens of them, their red hearts showing like small coals. Their petals had fallen in the night and lay on the melting snow in a perfect ring, and the snow around them had not yet gone.