Ultimate Life: The Rose Tattoo
Around Valentine's Day, roses grow everywhere. They grow on street corners, in supermarkets, on displays in subway stations and in vases in houses across the country. In the west, the rose is the most popular floral symbol; it is a symbol of love and eternity, passion and life. Like the eastern lotus, it is forever tied to culture and society, and through it, red is forever the color of intimate romance. Red, the color of blood, the essence of life, the soul of life, is embodied in the rose, and the rose itself is embodied in the rose tattoo. The rose tattoo combines ancient mythology with contemporary symbolism, reaching backward and forward to tie the loose ends of human thought together.
No Other Name
The rose was first used to symbolize love, beauty and life. When Adonis, Aphrodite's young lover, died, his blood sprouted roses along the ground. In one simply myth, the rose was infinitely tied to both death and life, blood and love, illustrating how, in some ways, love is the essence of life, and one cannot survive without the other. The rose tattoo channels this ancient mythology, but also the modern re-inventions of this story, including Valentine's Day and Romeo and Juliet, love long lost and love finally found. While the most common rose tattoo is red in color, other colors are used, and sometimes the rose is not all innocent; sometimes, large thorns are also sketched, illustrating the double-edged sword that is passion.
A yellow rose tattoo embodies a similarly-named folksong from the 1800s, a Texas tale of an ethnically-mixed young girl lost to her lover. The yellow rose is the rose of longing, the rose of waiting. A pink rose tattoo is graceful, gentile, maybe not as powerful yet as its red counterpart, a budding, innocent love. And a black rose, the rose of death and anarchy, rebellion and loss. In contemporary tattoo design, a black rose is often wilting, or pictured with ravens and skulls, other symbols of death. Adopted by many bands, the black rose tattoo also becomes a symbol of shared misery, a connection between fans and the sources of their obsessions.
However, historically, the black rose has symbolized quite the opposite of death: hope. In Ireland, the black rose was a source of rebellion, a symbol of hope in overthrowing the English empire. Darkly beautiful, it was the perversion of a loved English icon twisted to give Irish fighters heart and soul. Consequently, a black rose tattoo can embody much more than death: where there is hope, there is always a chance for life.
