Black and grey pencil sketch of a shaded carnation bloom on a long stem, drawn on plain paper.

Pencil sketch of a carnation

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a carnation bloom sits at the top of a single long stem, centred on a pale sheet of paper. The petals are shaded with soft graded tone and darker edges, giving the flower a layered, ruffled look. The background is plain and the stem tapers down to the bottom third of the frame.

Carnation Flower Stem Sketch

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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 man at lane four had a drawing of a carnation in a plastic wallet, and the form on my clipboard asked whether he was carrying plant material. I held the sheet under the lamp. Someone had shaded each petal darker at the rim, so the ruffles looked scorched, and the stem ran down the page as thin and grey as a wet pencil line. It was not a plant. It had never been one. I told him so, and he nodded as if he had expected the question.

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He said his mother had drawn it from memory on the back of a bus timetable the winter before she left the valley. She grew carnations in a yard by the railway, pinks and dark reds, and sold them in bunches outside the chapel on Sundays. When the road was closed she drew them instead, over and over, until the paper wore through at the centre of the bloom. This copy was the one she had made for him to take. He had kept it flat between two cereal boxes all the way from the coast.

The rules were clear enough. A picture is not a plant, I wrote, and the rules did not seem to care that a pencil can make a flower look more alive than a flower in a crate. I ticked the box marked none. Then I took the stamp from the drawer, pressed it to the corner of the wallet where the paper was clean, and pushed the drawing back across the counter.

He slid it inside his coat without looking at it again, and I watched him walk toward the far gate, where the lights were already yellow over the wet tarmac.