Four black and grey botanical flash drawings of succulent rosettes on a white background, shown as a tattoo design sheet with no body placement.

Four succulent rosettes in black and grey

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four top-down drawings of succulent rosettes, each with layered, overlapping leaves that radiate from a tight centre. The linework is fine and the leaves are shaded with soft grey tones and stippled texture, giving them volume and a slightly varied density from one design to the next. The drawings are arranged loosely across a plain white background in black and grey only.

Botanical Succulent Rosette Plant Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 had never trusted anything that could survive a month without water, so when her nephew came up the lane from the bus stop with a cardboard box under his arm, she met him at the gate with her arms folded. Inside the box, wrapped in yesterday's paper, were four rosettes of pale green wax, each as tight as a fist that had decided to open only partway.

Keep reading

"They're from Lisbon," he said, as though that settled it. "Some sailor's wife in Lowestoft swore they were unkillable."

The town of Harrowmere had a dry spring that year and a wet summer that made everything else rot. Mrs Abernethy set the rosettes on the kitchen windowsill above the sink, where the light came in thin and white off the slate roofs opposite. She did not water them. She forgot about them for a week, then remembered, then forgot again, and each time she came back the leaves had drawn in a little tighter at the heart and spread a little wider at the rim, like a skirt pulled out over a table.

By August the nephew had gone back to his job in Ipswich and the post office had stopped sending her letters about the chapel roof. She took down the largest rosette, turned it over in her palm, and found a clean pale stalk where the roots had begun. She snapped it off and pressed it into a jam jar of sand on the front step.

Within a month there were nine rosettes on that step. She gave three to the vicar's wife, two to the girl at the chemist, and kept the rest. When people asked how she managed it, she told them the truth, which was that she had simply stopped fussing and let the plant decide what it wanted to be.