Black and grey engraved-style rose tattoo with leaves and a draped bead strand, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Engraved rose with pearl strand on side

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits at the centre of the image, with layered petals, a tightly curled bud and several serrated leaves. Fine stippling and cross-hatching build up the shading, giving an engraved look, and a dotted chain of beads hangs across the lower petals. The image is in black and grey ink on skin, with the rose filling most of the frame and partial script visible at the top and lower left edges.

Botanical Ribs Rose Leaves Bead Pearl Chain 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 plate had been cut for a dead man's almanac, and Harriet Voss was the only one in Bristol who would still print from it. She inked the copper every Tuesday in the back room above the chandler's, wiping the surface with a rag until the lines held black and the ground ran clean. The rose was the hardest. Forty years of copying had taught the old engraver to hatch the petals in curves that followed the bloom, and Harriet had spent a winter learning to see where each curve bent.

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On the last Tuesday of March a stranger came up the stairs with a string of pearls wrapped twice around his wrist. He said they had belonged to a woman who worked the Liverpool packet and had given them to him for safekeeping. He wanted the beads drawn across the rose, every bead a separate dot punched into the metal, so that the pearls would outlast the woman and the boat. Harriet asked him why he did not simply keep the pearls. He looked at the rose for a long time before he answered.

She worked the dots through the night, one hard tap of the punch at a time, counting them under her breath until the lamp guttered. When the first proof came off the press the beads hung over the lower petals like a chain thrown down carelessly, and the stranger took the print without a word. Two weeks later a parcel arrived with no return address, and inside it was a single pearl wrapped in tissue, the same size as the ones she had punched.