Black and grey drawing of a rose whose petals are formed from banknote paper, with thorned stems wrapping around it, shown as a design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Banknote rose with thorns

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A rose is drawn with petals shaped from folded banknote paper, with the printed words ONE HUNDRED visible on the bands. Thorned stems wind around the bloom and the top of the image shows further detailed shapes. The image uses smooth grey shading and fine hatching for depth, against a plain pale background.

Realism Botanical Rose Banknote Thorn Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had soaked through the cardboard of my stall by nine, and the roses were the only things left dry under the tarpaulin. So when Tomasz from the fish van asked for one red rose for his wife and held out a crisp hundred-pound note, I laughed and said I'd need change from a rose that size.

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He didn't laugh. He said the note was all he had until Friday, and that his wife had been wanting something that didn't come from the petrol station. I looked at the coins in my apron pocket, the ones I'd been saving for the coach fare to my sister's in Leeds, and I did the sums in my head the way my father taught me, standing on a crate behind his barrow when I was eight.

I took the note, pressed it flat against the wet table, and began to fold. Corner over corner, tuck, roll, until the paper curled into petals and the words ONE HUNDRED ran round the bloom like the rim of a clock. Tomasz watched with his mouth open. The rain dripped off the tarp onto my knuckles and I did not stop, not even when a pigeon landed on the bucket and stared at us both.

When it was finished I wrapped the stems in a twist of brown paper and put the rose in his hand. He turned it over, afraid to unfold it, and then he laughed, a proper laugh that carried over the stalls. I took the damp coins from his palm for the stems, and counted them twice, because my father always said a rose should be paid for properly.