Pencil line drawing of crossed ornate scissors and two combs with two roses, a flash design in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed scissors and combs with roses

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a pair of crossed ornate scissors with scrolled, bead-edged handles, with two combs overlapping their blades. Two open roses sit between the crossed tools. The linework is fine and even in dark pencil or ink on pale paper, with no shading or colour.

Traditional Botanical Scissors Rose Flourish Design

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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

Mrs Abernethy came to the shop every second Thursday for thirty-one years, and every time she sat in my chair she told me the same thing: cut it like the roses at the Hall, which have never once been pruned. I never argued. The roses grew up the wall beside my door, a wild red tangle that the wood pigeons nested in, and I trimmed them with the same silver shears I used on the village heads, because my father always said a good pair of scissors does not care whether it is cutting hair or briar.

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The trouble started in March, when the thaw pushed the forest right up to the lane. Brambles came through the fence, a fox slept under my step, and one morning the bell over the door rang for a boy from the cottages who wanted a cut like the men on the tram posters. I told him to come back when he had a comb of his own. He left with nothing but his cheeks gone red, and I thought no more of it until the rain stopped.

I found my father's comb on the path where the wood thins into the common. Its bead-edged handle was hooked on a bramble, bright with wet, and the teeth were still clean of the grime that had lived in the drawer for a decade. Further along, the boy was sitting on the stile with a cardboard box of mushrooms in his lap, waiting as if he had always known I would come past.

I took the comb, sat him on the stile, and combed the dead leaves from his hair. Then I opened the shears, and the old steel sang the way it had when my father first let me hold it. Mrs Abernethy would have approved of the roses, I thought, and the roses, for once, did not argue.