I didn’t know there was so much history behind this design when I casually told Marco “I want a rose with a skeletal nuns head coming out of it with a cross behind it.”
He replied “I think I know what you mean” as he pulled up his pants leg and revealed a more classic version of the very design that was just described to him.
There was a leap of faith in getting this tattoo, the initial drawing was only a line drawing, that didn’t really turn me on, but I had an idea that marco had a vision that I didn’t see. Sometimes you have to see through the drawing, trust the artist and imagine the shading in your mind.
The Rose of No Man’s Land is a classic tattoo icon, which from what I can gather (on the internet of course) is derived from a song called the Rose of No Mans Land, by James A. Brennanwhich pays tribute to the nurses of WWI, who were primarily nuns.
This tattoo is dedicated to my mother who was a nurse her whole life. She is depicted as a skull because, for some reason I have a strong aversion to having faces drawn on my body even my mom.
She told me once
“Oh, On the fourth of July a little boy who looked like you, came in with his hand bandaged up, as I unrolled the bandage I saw that his whole hand was blown off just below the knuckles, I calmly bandaged it back up called in another nurse, and walked out of the ER never to work in one again. All I saw was you in that boy’s eyes.”
After that experience she worked as the night nurse for a jail for the criminally insane. Until she stopped working years later.
In my memory she is that rose, always growing in my mind.
There's a rose that grows in no-man's land
And it's wonderful to see,
Tho' it's sprayed with tears
It will live for years
In my garden of memory
It's the one red rose the soldier knows,
It's the work of the Master's hand;
In the War's great curse,
Stands the Red Cross nurse
She's the rose of no-mans land.
Oh you wanna see a picture, wait till it heals, but I have to say I love it, I just love it.
