Pen-and-ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a revolver with a red rose, leaves, a swirling ribbon and a pointed quill, styled as a neo-traditional piece.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and revolver tattoo design on paper

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on paper showing a revolver-style handgun with a red-shaded rose blooming over its grip and barrel. Below and to the left sit leaves, a round ornamental element with a swirling ribbon, and a pointed quill or blade tip. The linework is black and clean, with stippled dotwork shading on the gun and solid red fill on the rose, and two black fineliner pens lie beside the drawing.

Neo-trad Dotwork Revolver Gun Rose Leaves Ribbon Quill Swirl Pen

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 pistol came across the counter wrapped in a wool sock, the way men brought things they were ashamed of. Nell Garside unwrapped it under the lamp in the back room of the Co-op office, where she wrote letters for men who could not. The grip had been painted with a red rose, its petals worn soft by handling, and someone had stippled the steel around it in tiny dots, like frost on a windowpane.

Keep reading

"It was Tom's," said the woman who had brought it, not looking up from her gloves. "He won it at the Miners' Gala in oh-nine. Shot a tin rabbit off the fence at forty yards and the whole row cheered." She wanted two shillings toward the rent. Nell asked whether Tom would be wanting it back. The woman said Tom had gone down the Ellerby shaft in March and would not be wanting anything again. Nell wrote out the ticket in her careful copperplate, the nib scratching, and blotted it twice.

Nobody bought pistols in Carrick Dene. Men pawned their watches, their wedding rings, their mother's clock, but the gun had no buyer here and no use either. Nell turned the rose toward the lamp and saw a thin ribbon of ink curling under the petals, a line of words too small to read without her spectacles. She held the grip to the glass. Tom's initials, and beneath them a date that matched the afternoon the gala had been rained off.

She did not put the pistol in the window. She folded the ticket into the drawer with the parish registers, wrapped the revolver in its sock again, and wrote on the back of the ticket, in the smallest hand she had, the score of the tin rabbit. Forty yards. Six shots. One hit.