Pencil shaded tattoo design of a cello wrapped in two roses, a lily and flowing ribbons, with no body placement shown.

Cello with roses and lily in pencil

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a cello with its scroll at the top, set against two full-blown roses, a lily and a rose at the base. Thin ribbons loop and trail around the instrument, and soft graded shading gives the body, petals and leaves volume. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain pale background, with the motifs arranged in a vertical, balanced composition.

Realism Botanical Rose Lily Ribbon Leaves Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the hinges of the farmhouse door again, so you carry the cello up the ladder to the hayloft with its case strapped across your back and a length of blue ribbon trailing from the scroll. Your aunt Maud used to play it on Sunday evenings for nobody but the sheepdogs, and the dogs never once complained about the wolf notes. Below you the lamp in the byre is already lit, and the ewes are shifting in the straw, restless the way they get when the snow comes early.

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The roses came from the cold frame behind the milking parlour. Against all sense they bloomed in January, two full heads of them, because the boiler man left the pipes ticking and the glass held the heat like a held breath. Aunt Maud cut them for you that morning and tucked them into a jam jar, and the lily came from a bulb she had forced in the scullery sink, its petals freckled like a speckled hen. You set them on a hay bale beside the music stand and tie the ribbon to a nail so the whole arrangement looks like something from a funeral parlour or a wedding, you cannot decide which.

You play the slow movement of the Bach suite badly, your bow skittering on the C string, and the lead ewe lifts her head and bleats in what might be approval. The ribbon slides off the scroll and spills across the boards in loose loops. By the third verse a lamb is standing on wobbling legs under its mother, and you stop, breathing hard, while the snow ticks against the slates.

In the morning you climb back up for the cello and find the petals have frozen to the strings, pale and curled, each one a small grey scrap. The lamb is nosing at the lily's fallen stamen. You leave the instrument where it lies, hoping for a thaw.