Black and grey pencil drawing of an ornate lantern with a rose, leaves, bees and radiating rays, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lantern and rose design with bees

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an ornate lantern with a scrolled top, a rose at the base and leaves framing the lower section. Two bees and radiating rays surround the lantern, and the glass panel shows swirling smoke or flame lines. The shading is in soft grey tones with bold outlines on a pale paper background.

Traditional Neo-trad Lantern Rose Leaves Bee Ray Smoke

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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

Tom, the drifts came over the top of the lych gate on Tuesday, and Mother has stopped pretending the road to Hexworth will open before March. So I am writing this at the kitchen table with the lantern lit beside me, because the lamp over the stable door has gone out twice this week and I will not climb that ladder in this wind.

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You will laugh, but the lantern is the only thing in this house that still behaves. The brass has gone green at the seams and the glass is cracked down one side, yet it throws its light like a good dog throws a ball. Last night the smoke inside it curled into the shape of the old weather vane, and Mother said that was the bees' doing. Father kept hives behind the orchard wall, you remember, and when he died the bees were the one thing nobody wanted to sell. Mrs Pell still leaves them a saucer of sugar water by the wall each morning, though it freezes before noon.

Three travellers came up the lane at dusk, a surveyor and his two mules, and they asked for a bed as though the Plough were a palace. We gave them the room above the tap. The surveyor sat by the fire after supper and drew our inn in pencil, the chimneys and the rose bush trained over the porch, and he said he would sell the picture in Carlisle. I did not tell him the rose is ours, not his, and that I counted its buds every spring before he was born.

Come home when the thaw starts. Bring the good spade. I have hung the lantern at the gate so you can find the path, and I have promised the bees you will be back before they wake.