Black and grey engraved flash drawing of a cluster of roses, buds and leaves in hatched linework, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Engraved rose spray design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white engraved illustration of two full-blown roses, a larger bloom at the centre and a second partly open rose to the upper right, with several rosebuds and serrated leaves arranged in a horizontal spray. The form is built from fine hatched and cross-hatched lines, with shading concentrated on the petal folds and leaf undersides. The background is plain white, and the composition is balanced and symmetrical around the central blooms.

Traditional Botanical Rose Rosebud Leaves

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the cloister door. I have a tale about roses and a dead man's burin, and the telling of it takes as long as the Lord sees fit.

Keep reading

Brother Hild kept the scriptorium at Saint Ebba's in the years when the abbot still had money for copper. The prior wanted a spray of roses for the frontispiece of the new herbal, two full blooms with buds and serrated leaves, and he would not allow a pattern to be copied. So Hild went out at first light with a wicker basket and cut the blooms himself. He sat among the beds until the dew had dried on them, counting the petal folds and muttering numbers like a man at his prayers.

Brother Wulf, who ground the ink and sharpened the tools, complained that the roses would be dead and brown before the plate was bitten. Hild said the plate would outlast the roses, and the roses would outlast Wulf, and Wulf had better fetch the vinegar. Through the winter Hild cut his lines so fine that the lamp shook in his hands. Where the leaves turned under, he hatched the shadow tighter and tighter, until the printed page looked lit from beneath, as if the blooms had been brought in from a warm wall at dusk.

Hild died the week the first swallows came back. The abbot went down to the scriptorium to find the copper plate, and found it cleaned and oiled, with one small rosebud scratched into the bottom margin, so tiny that a man needed a glass to see it. Nobody had asked for it. Nobody had drawn it in the pattern. When the herbals go out now, the buyers hold the pages to the window and swear the roses still smell of wet earth. They do. I have checked.