Black and grey pencil sketch of an ornate tattoo design with a central rose, two side roses, lace-like patterning and dotted chains drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and lace ornamental design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows a large central rose flanked by two smaller roses, framed by intricate lace-like patterning, a pointed ornament at the top and a teardrop-shaped pendant below. Dotted chain lines hang in scallops along the lower edge. The work is rendered in fine black linework with stippled shading on a pale sheet, with no colour and a symmetrical composition.

Botanical Geometric Rose Lace Ornament Dotted chain Pendant Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had pricked the pattern onto card forty times before Mrs Aske let her draw one herself, and even then it was the old woman's hand that corrected the scallops. "Lace is only a promise to hold together," she said, tapping the pinholes of a rose. "Every hole has to be where the thread expects it."

Keep reading

The commission came up from the river wharves in a cab that smelled of tar: a veil for a sea captain's daughter, to be worn at a wedding in Hull the week her father's ship sailed. The drawing that came with it had a rose at its heart, two smaller roses at its wings, and a drop-shaped pendant hanging from a thread of tiny dots. Nell worked the bobbins through three winters of candle-lit evenings, and in the last one she saw that the dotted chain was not decoration at all. Each dot was a knot, and the knots, read in order, were the tide-tables of the Margaret, the days out and the days in.

She carried the veil to the wharf herself. The captain's daughter was not there, only a boy with a sack of biscuits, who said the Margaret had gone a fortnight early, on the morning the glass dropped. Nell folded the lace and kept it on her knee the whole long ride home, the pendant swinging against her wrist, counting knots she had tied for a voyage nobody had told her was leaving.