A hand holding a purple pen draws a rose with curling vines and leaves on graph paper, a botanical tattoo design in fine line.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and scroll vine design drawn in pen

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A hand holding a pen draws a rose in bloom with layered petals, leaves and curling vines on squared graph paper. The outlines are drawn in a single dark purple ink with smooth, even strokes and small spiral scrolls filling the space around the flower. The design is centred on the page and the rest of the paper is plain.

Botanical Rose Vine Leaves Scroll Swirl Flower Pen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still, because the rain's come in under the hatch again and I'll not say it twice. Your great-aunt Mabel had a pen the colour of plums, a narrowboat called Patience, and a tin of squared paper she'd got from the boatyard office. Winter on the Grand Union is long if you let it be. She'd sit by the stove with the paper on her knee and draw roses, because she'd never managed to draw anything else that looked like a thing you'd want to keep.

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Every evening the lock-keeper, Walter Dunn, walked past with his terrier and stopped at the window to look. He said the petals were packed too tight and the vine ran off where it had no business going. She told him to mind his gates. Then one February the ice came down thick on the cut, and for nine days his lamp stayed dark at the lock house.

On the tenth morning she broke the ice with the boathook, walked the towpath with the page inside her coat, and pushed it under his door. Nobody answered, but the paper came back to her the next day with a thorn drawn on every stem in pencil, and a single word at the bottom in capitals that she would never tell anyone, not even me.

The next spring Walter painted that rose on the balance beam of the lower gate, a foot high, with the scrolls curling out over the water exactly where her ink had run. Boats still go through under it. Mind your head on the way past, and don't you dare touch the thorns.