Black ink drawing on paper of a tattoo design showing a rose above a crossing arrow with a dotted geometric shape below, with a marker pen at the top edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and arrow tattoo design on paper

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing on paper of a tattoo design. A rose sits at the upper left and an arrow passes diagonally through the composition, with a shaded, mandala-like geometric form beneath it. The linework is clean and the shading uses dots and hatching, with a marker pen placed across the top of the sheet.

Botanical Geometric Rose Arrow Mandala Flower Geometric shape

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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

Ruth Calvert had drawn the chapel window four times before she got the dots right. The rose sat at the top of it, cut in the old glass the colliery company had paid a Newcastle firm to fire in 1891, and the lead lines ran out from its centre like the spokes of something measured very carefully by someone who did not trust measuring. Her son Danny was due on the back shift at six. He had asked her for a drawing he could take down the pit in his pocket, something to look at when the cage stopped and the lamps swung.

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She worked at the kitchen table with the marker pen her grandson had left, pressing the dots in one at a time while the kettle went cold twice. The mandala below the rose was her own invention, a ring of petals that turned into teeth if you looked too long, the way the lamp-room men said the coal face did at the end of a long shift. Across the whole sheet she laid an arrow, because her father had fletched shafts for the boys' archery club on the rec before the war, and because the arrow pointed down and then up again, which seemed honest about pits.

Danny came in with his boots already laced and stood over her shoulder. He said nothing for a while. Then he tapped the rose and said the petals were wrong, there were seven, and the window had six. She counted. He was right. She picked up the pen and put in the sixth, and the drawing closed.

At the pit head he unfolded it, looked, folded it again and slid it into the breast pocket where the wage slips usually went. Ruth walked home along the back lane with her hands in her coat and waited for the whistle that meant the shift had come up safe. It came at a quarter past two. She did not count the petals this time.