Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a rose made from folded dollar bills with leaves and black script lettering beneath, in a realism style.

Rose made of folded banknotes with script

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite drawing on paper, shown in a sketchbook, of a rose whose petals are formed from folded dollar bills with visible portraits and an eye motif. Dark leaves surround the bloom, and a line of calligraphic script sits along the bottom. The shading is black and grey, with soft tonal gradients on the paper bills and heavier shadows on the leaves.

Realism Lettering Rose Dollar bill Money Leaves Script Banknote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The till at Greaves Flowers came up forty pounds short again on the Tuesday, and Dennis Hale blamed the draught from the cold room. Nobody in Bradford believed him, least of all his wife, who did the books on Sundays with a biro between her teeth. That night he sat at the back bench with a fold of dollars his brother had brought back from Florida, and he began folding them into petals, one corner tucked under the next, the way his mother had shown him with paper.

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By midnight a rose sat on the zinc, its leaves cut from the green tissue he used for wrapping, and every petal carried a stiff portrait or a scrap of printed script. He had worked a dark eye into the centre fold. Marion found him there at six, still in his coat, and she didn't say a word for almost a minute. Then she picked the rose up by its stem as if it might bite and said it was the most expensive flower she had ever held.

He tried to explain. He had been taking twenties from the float since the spring, a little here and there, to cover his brother's rent in Tampa, a debt he had never told anyone about. He had folded the stolen money into something he could look at. Marion turned the rose over slowly, reading the faded print through the paper, and set it down in the front window between the carnations and the bucket of lilies, where the street could see it.

Next morning the till balanced to the penny. Dennis came in early and found a note tucked under the rose in her neat capitals: PAY IT BACK A PETAL AT A TIME. COME HOME FOR TEA. He did. The rose stayed in the window all summer, its dark eye watching the buses go past, and nobody ever asked him to fold another.