Standalone botanical tattoo design of red and black roses joined by black swirling scrolls on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black rose scroll design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The design shows three roses, two red and one black, linked by flowing black scrollwork and small dotted circles. The linework is bold and smooth, with solid black swirls and shaded red petals giving the roses some depth. The composition runs horizontally across a plain white background, with the largest rose at the upper right and smaller blooms at the centre and lower left.

Botanical Rose Scroll Swirl Floral Dot

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

The vines in the Hollin Deep greenhouse grew the way the old women said they should, in loops that doubled back on themselves, and nobody had trimmed them since the third dry year. Each morning Ama Teskey walked the long gallery with a tin of seed and a cracked lamp, counting the red roses that had come through the night. Three mattered on the lower terrace. The fourth was black, grew alone in the sump where the water used to be, and belonged to nobody.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had told her the rule plainly, the way you tell a child which stair creaks. The black rose opens for the one who asks for it, and it asks a price. Pick a red bloom for the magistrate's table and the ship keeps its light. Pick the black and you must leave a red one in its place, petal for petal, until the vine is satisfied. The small grey rings that turned among the scrollwork were the cold moons, her grandmother said, and whenever one rolled past the rim, somebody aboard made a wish they would later regret.

One cycle, a boy from the pump decks came up the ladder with his mother's ring pressed into his palm. His sister had gone grey with the dust fever, and he had nothing red to give. Ama knelt in the wet sump, cut the black bloom with her knife, and laid the red rose from her own coat on the stone where it had been. The vine went quiet. The boy's sister lived. By morning the rose Ama had worn was black, and the lamp in the gallery has burned steady ever since.