Black ink line drawing of a rose bud with leaves, small flowers and dotwork shading, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose bud with leaves and dotwork shading

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a rose bud wrapped in leaves, with small five-petalled flowers on the left and right and a small banner near the top. Stippled dotwork shading sits along one side of the bud and the leaf edges, while the outlines are bold and even. The design is shown on white paper with a pen lying across the top right corner.

Dotwork Neo-trad Rose Bud Leaves Flower Banner Stipple

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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 down, sit down, the eight-ten is running forty minutes behind and nobody on this platform is going anywhere until it decides to. So I'll tell you about the rose that grew up the wall by the lamp room at Cold Ashby, the one with leaves like cupped hands and little dots of shadow down one side, as if someone had breathed frost on it.

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Old Tobias Quill kept that bush for thirty-one years. He pruned it with a signalman's penknife and talked to it the way some men talk to dogs. Every spring it put out buds, and every spring he cut the best one before it could open, wrapped it in damp muslin, and slid it into a tin box with a ribbon banner painted across the lid. Inside he wrote two letters in pencil. Nobody knew who they were for.

Then the war came, the line was doubled, and the bush was grubbed out for a coal siding. Tobias retired to a cottage with no garden at all. Forty years on, the tin turned up behind a loose brick in the lamp room, and the lad who found it opened it on the spot. The bud inside had gone brown and papery, but pressed flat against the lid was a small pale rose, drawn in ink by a hand that had clearly practised.

Underneath the drawing was one line: she will know which train. Nobody ever found out who she was. Though some say a woman stepped off the eight-ten every Thursday for years, and always walked straight past the lamp room without once looking at the wall.