Black and grey traditional style rose tattoo design with shaded petals and hatched leaves, drawn on a grey background with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose with leaves

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A bold rose in full bloom sits at the centre of the design, with its petals shaded in soft dotted greys and outlined in thick black lines. Hatched leaves surround the flower on all sides, with fine parallel strokes adding texture. The plain grey background is shown without any skin or body placement.

Traditional Botanical Rose Leaves Petal Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Oona Pryce kept the lamp at Carrow Halt, the last stop before the tunnel, and every night at ten the signal bell rang for a train that had been cancelled in 1931. She told the porter this as plainly as she told him the price of tea. He had heard it before. The bell rang, the lamp swung, and nothing came out of the dark but the smell of wet coal and a long cold draught.

Keep reading

One February a boy called Tobias Lund came off the milk van with a tin box under his arm and nowhere to go. His aunt, who kept the chapel garden, had died the week before. Mrs Pryce gave him the bench by the stove and asked what was in the tin. A rose, he said, cut from the bush behind the vestry, the one that never opened properly. Grey sort of flower, she said. It's the shadow that makes it, he said, and she let that be the end of the talk.

At ten the bell rang. Mrs Pryce took the lamp and the boy took the tin, and they walked down the platform to where the rails ran into the black mouth of the tunnel. A carriage stood there with its windows full of people in old coats, none of them looking out. The boy knelt on the sleeper and laid the rose across the rail. The door of the last carriage opened by itself, and the draught that came out smelt of cut stems and rain.

The train took one thing each winter and gave back one thing each spring, Mrs Pryce said, and she had never once asked which was which. When Tobias came back in April the bench was empty and the stove was cold. On the rail, where the rose had been, lay a single bloom, opened wide, its petals dark at the edges and pale at the heart, and its leaves hatched fine as rain on a window. Mrs Pryce picked it up and set the lamp down beside it.