I ain't winning no one over
I wear it just for you
I've got your name written here
In a rose tattoo

—    “Rose Tattoo,” Dropkick Murphys

Everyone in the neighborhood knows what Rose did, but no one will openly discuss it. Her neighbors wink and nod to one another whenever Rose passes by. Some will even go as far as to whisper, “You know . . . .” But none of them will actually say the words, or talk to Rose about it, or ask her how she is doing. Most just hope that someday when they wake up, they will find that Rose has left one way or another without a trace. And that suits Rose just fine.

Rose is the kind of woman who can cope with whispers. She learned that lesson well from her father. Known as the “Tattoo Artist to the Stars,” Rose’s father could afford the kind of house in the kind of neighborhood that no one else in their family could ever hope to afford. But even with their wealth, Rose’s family was always seen as something more akin to the The Sons of Anarchy than The Brady Bunch by their neighbors. And after Rose’s mother died the year she turned eighteen, Rose’s father was suspected of some kind of shenanigans with one unhappy housewife after another. Rumors of tiny teddy bear tattoos marking his conquests in intimate places began to spread throughout the community. Husbands grumbled in front of shotgun displays at the Cabela’s mega store, while their wives whispered to one another behind the trellis of trumpet flowers on the neighborhood green during the monthly pot-luck. Even so, no one ever had the gall to call out Rose’s father to his face throughout his relatively short life. Less than three years after becoming a widower, Rose’s father died from a thunderclap heart attack in his wife’s rose garden that had secretly become the envy of all the neighborhood’s anthophiles.

As far as the neighbors are concerned, what Rose did after her parents died was far worse than the indignities of her father’s suspected nocturnal activities. They wonder to themselves if Rose chose to flaunt rather than hide the evidence of her indiscretion as a way of avenging all the whispers about her father. They wonder how she can live with the shame that her father brought onto her and the dark cloud they believe she purposely created to cast a permanent shadow over their carefully manicured world. Only Rose herself is certain that she can live with it. She has already been living with it for years. It has become her life partner. She wakes up to it every morning, takes it with her wherever she goes throughout the day, and carries it to bed with her at 11 on the dot every night.

And now, on the 10th anniversary marking the night that Rose did what she did, she wakes with a jolt and sits bolt upright. The last remnant of the recurring nightmare where her father fertilizes the rose garden with her mother’s ashes while whistling “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles fades like the echo of an “Amen” in a stone cathedral. She desperately reaches for the shelf above the bed and lets out a sigh of relief when her fingers wrap around the buckhorn handle of a hunting knife.

Years before, in an attempt to fit in with the neighbor’s, Rose’s father had taken up hunting, a pastime that had never held any charm for him before moving into the neighborhood, but one he grew to love after bagging his first buck. On the eve of what would be the first of many hunts together, Rose’s father presented her with the buckhorn knife, despite the protestations of Rose’s mother in the name of all that she considered feminine. The nine-inch blade had been hand-forged by a blacksmith client and the handle had been carved from a buck’s antler by a well-known taxidermist in exchange for an anvil and leopard tattoo respectively.

“You’ll need this,” Rose’s father had told her as he laid the knife in her open hands, “when you make your first kill.”

And when Rose finally took down a four-point buck after three years of trying, she used the knife to field dress the carcass as her father beamed with pride.

“He’ll make a fine addition to the trophy room, don’t you think?”

“But what about Mom?”

“You let me worry about your mother. Besides, deep down she loves a good venison steak.”

Rose takes the knife from the shelf and hugs it to her chest, holding it there until it warms through. She gently runs the tip along the petals of six tattooed roses that bloom in bunches of three on each palm, guides the blade down the long stems of scars that run from wrist to crook, pausing to touch each of the twelve tattooed thorns designed to look as if they pierce her skin before she places the knife gently back on the shelf and drifts off to sleep. While everyone in the neighborhood may remember what Rose did, no one, not even Rose, truly knows how deep the roots grow.

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. His writing has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, HAD, Jellyfish Review, MoonPark Review, New World Writing, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He spends most of his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.