Pencil sketch of a tattoo design with a rose at the centre, leaves, stacked triangles and dotted lines, drawn on skin.

Rose and geometric triangles sketch

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a rose in bloom sits at the centre of a vertical composition, with leaves on either side and stacked outline triangles above and below. Dotted lines run horizontally through the rose and vertically at the top and bottom, forming a symmetrical layout. The drawing uses soft grey shading on the petals and leaves and fine outlines on the geometric shapes, with no colour.

Geometric Botanical Rose Leaves Triangle Dot Geometric shape Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Ferrier Pass for three days, and Hetty Marr had read the stranger's drawing so many times that the rose had begun to look like a face. He had left it under the salt cellar on Tuesday, folded in four, and gone up to the room over the bar without a word. A rose in soft grey pencil, its petals shaded dark at the heart, sat between two stacks of triangles, one pointing to the rafters and one to the flagstones. Dotted lines ran out sideways from its middle like a surveyor's sight line.

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Her father found her at the window before dawn, the lamp guttering. 'That's Owen's,' he said, not a question. 'He asked the way down to the old mill race. I told him nobody goes that way in February.' He tapped the lower triangle. 'Those point where the water goes.' Hetty counted the dots below the bottom point: four of them, then a small inverted triangle at the very end, the same mark stamped on the sluice boards when she was a girl.

She took the lantern out at first light, the drifts reaching her knees where the wind had packed them. The race ran black under a skin of ice, and beneath the broken wheel she found the sluice gate exactly where the dots said it would be, a squat iron door set into the stone. Someone had scraped the rime off it. Scratched into the metal, fresh as yesterday, was a single leaf turned toward the ground.

When she came back up the lane, Owen was sitting on the step with his boots unlaced, watching her come. He did not ask what she had found. He only nodded at the paper in her hand and said the pass would open by Thursday. Hetty folded the drawing back into four, put it in her apron pocket, and went in to put the kettle on.