Pencil sketch of a cross entwined with a thorned vine and a rose, drawn on graph paper, in a botanical style suited to a tattoo design.

Rose and thorned vine on a cross

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an ornate cross with pointed, decorated arms, a rose with layered petals and serrated leaves at its upper left, and a thorned vine wrapping around the cross from the rose down to the base. The linework is fine and sketched in graphite with soft shading on the petals and cross bars. It is drawn in black and grey on squared graph paper.

Botanical Cross Rose Thorn Vine Leaves

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

Sit closer, the tent is too big for this fire and the wind keeps carrying my words up into the canvas. Last season Pellow's Travelling Wonder had nine wagons and a lion with bad teeth. By the first frost there was one elephant, a boy called Sol who swept the sawdust, and Mrs Ashdown, who sold toffee apples from a barrow with a wheel that squealed.

Keep reading

The cross came off the chapel at Thorncombe, where the ring had wintered in the churchyard for want of anywhere else. Nobody knew who carved it. Its arms ended in pointed leaves like folded bishop's mitres, and a briar had been wound up the upright by someone long dead, with a rose planted at its foot. Sol swore the briar grew one thorn for every lie told under the big top. Mrs Ashdown said that was nonsense, then pricked her thumb on it and said nothing for a week.

Mr Pellow meant to sell the cross to a collector from Bristol for forty pounds, which would have paid the feed bill and bought him a ticket to somewhere warm. The night before the man came, the rose opened on the frozen ground, though it was December and the ground was iron. Sol went out with the shears to cut it back and found that the briar had grown over a row of names carved small along the grain, every one of them a performer who had left the ring and never come back.

Pellow tore up the bill of sale in the morning. We set the cross on the central pole and we stayed, and the rose is still there, though the tent went to rags years ago. If you walk to Thorncombe in June and put your palm flat on the upright, you will feel a thorn. That is how we know the show is still on.