Black and grey drawing of a rose with hatched leaves and a faceted heart ringed with beads, shown as a neo-traditional tattoo design on paper.

Rose and jewelled heart tattoo design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-and-ink style drawing of an open rose with shaded petals, surrounded by hatched leaves and a faceted heart outlined with dots. The linework is bold and even, with grey shading on the petals and a dark framing panel behind the motif. The design is drawn on cream paper beside a black marker, and the composition is centred with the rose at the top and the heart at the base.

Neo-trad Botanical Rose Heart Leaves Gem Bead Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had been trained against the south wall of Mrs Ashdown's cottage for forty years, and by August it had grown tired of being looked at through the kitchen window. Tom Pargeter came up the lane with his barrow on the third Tuesday of the month, as he had every month since his knees went, and found the gate open and the hinge oiled, which meant someone had been waiting for him.

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She was sitting on the back step with a tin of pencils and a sheet of cream paper weighted with a stone. She didn't get up. The rose was in full flower above her, its outer petals shaded grey where the afternoon sun never reached, and below it, pinned in the ivy like a brooch somebody had dropped, hung the little faceted heart her husband had cut from a shard of his mother's glass decanter the winter before he died. It caught the light the way water does in a bucket.

"I want it drawn properly," she said. "Every leaf. Every bead of the border. Nothing left soft."

Tom knelt in the wet grass and began to pull the bindweed out from under the frame. He had done this job for her before, and he knew she would not thank him for telling her the roses were past their best. Instead he sharpened the pencil with his penknife and said the heart would need a bit more light on the left side, and she said he was a cheeky old devil, and for the first time since the funeral they both laughed out loud.