Pencil drawing of a shaded cross with a rose bud and leaves at its base, in a neo-traditional style, shown without a body placement.

Cross and rose design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a cross with a rose bud and several leaves growing up from its lower section. The cross has bevelled edges and the rose has layered petals, both shaded with soft grey graphite and darker hatching on one side. The design is centred on a plain white background, with the rose overlapping the lower arm of the cross.

Neo-trad Botanical Cross Rose Leaves Rose bud

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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

The officer at Hollin Bridge wants the tin open before anything else, so you thumb the lid off and let the cold air in. Inside, the bud sits in wet newspaper like a fist that has forgotten how to open. He doesn't touch it. He tilts his head and asks what it is, and you tell him it's a rose, which is true, and that it's a cutting, which is also true, and that it has to reach Maddox Farm by Friday.

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The cross is the part he doesn't believe. Your grandfather cut it from a gatepost the spring he left for the mill towns, bevelled every edge with a chisel, and buried the base so deep the frost never lifted it. The rose climbed the lower arm every summer after that, pushing through the gaps in the wood. When she died, you took the cutting. Nothing in the rules says a rose must be declared as anything other than a rose.

He reads your paperwork twice, then a third time, lips moving over the nursery's stamp from Colchester. He lifts the bud out of the paper with two fingers and holds it up to the strip light, and for a moment the petals throw grey shadows across the desk, layered and soft as pencil on card. He asks whether it will hold. You say it will hold if somebody keeps it wet and upright and away from the wind.

He stamps the form, tears off the yellow copy and slides the tin back across the counter. Keep it wet, he says, and then he adds that his own mother had a bush like that, and he never once remembered to water it. You close the lid. On the far side of the bridge the road runs straight and wet towards a field you have never seen, and you hold the tin against your chest like something that might still climb.