Black and grey flash design of a rose formed from folded dollar bills, drawn with fine linework and stippled shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose made from folded dollar bills

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a rose whose petals are folded US dollar bills, with the denomination 100 visible on several notes. The outer petals are drawn with crisp outlines and the centre is built up with fine stippling and cross-hatching. The image is entirely black ink on white, with no colour and no body placement shown.

Dotwork Realism Rose Dollar bill Money Banknote Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gwen Pryce had counted the notes twice at the kitchen table before she let herself look at the rose. Hundred-dollar bills, a fat brown envelope of them, sent across the Atlantic by a cousin in Ohio nobody had spoken to since the strike. Her brother Dai had already smoothed each one flat with the side of a spoon and was folding them into petals, working with the stubby fingers that had once handled roof bolts underground. He would not say why. He only said the paper had to be cut against the grain or it would never hold its shape.

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The colliery had closed eleven years ago, and the village had been folding itself smaller ever since. Shops shuttered, the Institute ran bingo for six old men, and the men who had once gone down at five in the morning now queued at the Job Centre on a Tuesday with their hands in their pockets. Dai's rose sat on the mantelpiece between the clock and a photograph of their father in his helmet. Every week someone asked whether he would sell it, and every week he said the money was for something else, though he never said what.

Gwen unfolded the centre one night, meaning to see how it was built, and found that every note in the heart was a single pound coin's worth of tightly rolled paper, pressed in tight so nothing could unravel without tearing. Dai had wrapped the rest around it like a bandage. She sat with the thing in her lap until the kettle boiled dry.

In the morning she carried the rose down to the Co-op and asked the girl at the till what it was worth. The girl checked the rate on her phone and said a figure that made Gwen laugh out loud. She thanked her and walked back up the hill, and set the rose in the front window facing the old pit road, where the night shift used to walk home.