Black and grey fine line rose tattoo with the words Beauty lies within in script beside its stem, on the side of a torso in the Ribs area.

Rose with script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single rose with a long stem and two leaves is drawn in fine black linework, with its petals partly shaded in dotwork. The script words Beauty lies within run down the left of the stem in a flowing handwritten style. The photograph is black and white and shows the tattoo centred on the side of the torso, with the rose at the top and the stem extending towards the lower edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Lettering Ribs Rose Stem Leaves Script Petal

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 nearer, the gas is low and the rain's come on again, so you'll hear me better if you don't lean back into the dark. Now, you want the one about the rose. Everybody on Cable Street knows the rose, though none of them will tell you what it cost. Old Mrs Ashdown kept a stall under the railway arches, and she sold one bloom a night, wrapped in brown paper, to whoever came with the right coin and the wrong face.

Keep reading

One October a lad came down from the north with a cardboard suitcase and no money at all. He stood in the drizzle and watched her sort the stems. He said he would carry crates for a rose. She said she had no roses to spare. He said he would carry them anyway, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on an upturned box.

He worked three winters for her. Every night he cleared the thorns off the stems with his thumbnail, and every night she told him the same thing while she tied the bundles: the outside of a flower is only the weather it has had to stand. Look under the petals, boy, where it's dark and folded. That's where it keeps itself.

He never understood her until the spring she died, when he unwrapped her last bloom and found, pressed inside the paper, a folded note in her hand. It said only, Beauty lies within, and under that, in smaller writing, Keep the stall open, and I'll not charge you for the thorns.