Pencil sketch of a shaded rose with leaves and a stem wrapped in three ribbon banners, drawn as a tattoo design in black and grey.

Rose with ribbon banners in pencil

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of an open rose at the top, with layered petals, curled leaves and a stem. Three ribbon banners wrap around the stem below the bloom, each with folded edges and shaded creases. The drawing uses soft graded graphite shading on a plain pale background, with no text or lettering.

Neo-trad Botanical Rose Ribbon Banner Leaves Stem Petal

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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

The third ribbon was the one that always frayed, so you sat on an upturned crate behind the horse lorry with the sewing box open on your knee and the rose cut from Mr Abernethy's buttonhole lying across your palm. Its petals had gone soft at the edges after three weeks in his waistcoat. Nobody had told him the show was folding in Carlisle. Nobody had told you either, not in words, only in the way the bills stopped arriving and the printer's boy stopped whistling.

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The banners were older than the rose. Each one had been a poster once, cut down and folded, its creases shaded grey by years of damp canvas. You could still make out the faded names of the towns where the show had stood: Hexham, Kendal, and at the bottom, Penrith, which had been the best week of the whole season. You stitched the folds flat, one by one, the way your mother had taught you to hem a costume, not trusting the thread to hold on its own.

Mr Abernethy came round the side of the lorry with his hat in his hand and asked what you were doing with his flower. You told him you were wrapping the stem so it would survive the road. He said roses don't survive roads. You said neither do we, and tied the knot tighter than you needed to.

When the lamps went out along the field, you left the rose on the passenger seat of the lorry, the three banners wound round its stem like the bands on a cigar, the last one still bearing the word Penrith in gold that had mostly rubbed away. In the morning there would be no show to pack for. You knew that. You had finished the work anyway, because it was the last thing in the tent that still needed doing properly.