Black and grey design of a Lutheran rose with a cross in the heart, framed by a ring of Latin text and ornate scrollwork, shown as a standalone drawing rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lutheran rose emblem with cross

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical emblem showing a white rose with a black heart at its centre, holding a silver cross. A circular band of Latin text surrounds the rose, with decorative scrollwork and foliage filling the dark background around the ring. The rendering uses fine engraved-style linework and grey shading against a black ground, with no colour ink.

Rose Cross Heart Latin text Scrollwork Emblem Foliage

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

Ailsa had the minister's psalter open on the workbench and was scratching the Latin round the rim of the wax with a bradawl, letter by letter, because her father could not read it. Sola, gratia, she breathed, and the metal ticked as it cooled. Don't rush the S, her father said. A bell speaks its lettering whether you mean it to or not.

Keep reading

The rose went in the middle, white petals opened round a heart as black as the peat cut at Lenabay, and at its centre a silver cross he had made from Old Ruth's wedding spoon. Folk said the rose was a grudge against the bishop in Kirkwall, and he let them say it. It was for the chapel of the drowned, the stone box above the tideline where wives lit tallow for men the sea had kept.

The night the Girl Mairi went down off the Skerry, fog came in thick as wool, and the boats sent out after her could not find the harbour. Ailsa, sent up with the rope, rang the bell until her palms bled through the cloth. Three boats came home along that sound, the last with Tam Gunn at the oars, pulling toward the note like a man following a hand held out in the dark.

Next morning the bell was whole. Ailsa ran her thumb over the four words and felt the letters cold and sharp. Her father said nothing about the rope or the hands. He only hung the bell so the rose faced the water, so anyone coming in from the sea would see the black heart first and know whose house was lit.