Neo-traditional flash design of a green zombie hand gripping a red rose, with two curled banners and a small skull at the lower left.

Zombie hand holding a red rose with banners

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a green, decaying hand gripping a red rose on a long stem, with wounds and drips of blood on the fingers. Two grey banners curl around the design, each carrying lettering, and a skull sits at the lower left beside the hand. Bold dark outlines and soft shading give the rose and hand their form against a plain black background.

Neo-trad Rose Hand Banner Skull Blood Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Haskell swore the hand had been reaching for the church bell rope, but Dad said it was only lime bleeding through the chalk. I was fourteen that summer and had been sent to help him dig a new grave at Ashby Hollow, so I was the one who saw it first, lying on the spoil heap with a red rose clamped between its fingers as if someone had told it not to drop the thing.

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Nobody in Ashby wanted to bury it. The vicar said it belonged to nobody, the constable said it belonged to the vicar, and so it sat on the workshop bench under a tarpaulin while the town argued. Only Edie Marsh, who worked the Co-op counter and had lost a brother on the Normandy beaches, would look at it properly. She brought it a cup of tea each afternoon, and one day she read the grey ribbon out loud, the letters slow and careful: NEVER DIES. She said it was the most honest thing anyone had written in Ashby since the war memorial went up.

The turn came in August, when the rose opened. Nobody had watered it. Dad swore he'd cut it fresh from the Hollow hedge and it had been dead for a fortnight, but on the Sunday the petals were full and red as a pillar box, and the green fingers had loosened just enough to let the stem sit easy. Edie stopped carrying the tea back to the bench. She set the cup on the windowsill beside it instead and said good morning as though it had a name.

We buried the hand in October, under the old yew where the lane bends. Edie held the rose while Dad shovelled, and nobody said a prayer. When we walked back through the lychgate the ribbon was lifting in the wind, the words turned up to the sky where anyone passing could read them, and Edie didn't look back once.