Pencil and pen drawing of two roses inside a triangle, shaded in grey at the top and pink-red at the base, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose within a triangle design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of roses inside an upright triangle, with two blooms shown in detail. The upper section uses fine grey pencil shading and cross-hatching on the petals and leaves. The lower rose is filled with pink-red ink, and the triangle outline is drawn in dark ink on a white sheet beside two pens.

Botanical Geometric Rose Flower Triangle Leaves

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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

Mind the third stair, love, it has opinions of its own. Sit yourself down by the window and I'll tell you about the sign over the door, since you've been squinting at it since Tuesday as if it owed you money.

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Your grandfather's grandfather painted it, or near enough. Ezra Pell came off the Margate boat in 1931 with a tin of red lead, one good brush and a debt to a man called Dunstan who owned the pier and most of the promenade. Ezra had no money, so he painted a rose inside a three-cornered board, because the Pells never trusted a square. He did the top of the bloom in grey pencil, he used to say, because the sea would take the colour first, and he wanted the flower to outlast the bargain.

Dunstan came to collect in the winter of 1934, when the wind was coming straight off the water and the windows rattled like teeth. Ezra had nothing to hand over but the house. So he walked him out under the porch and showed him the red half of the board, sheltered from the spray, and said that was the rose and the grey was only the sea's share. Dunstan laughed, took the lease on the promenade shops instead, and never climbed our steps again.

The grey has gone soft and the gulls have had their way with it, so every April I go up the ladder with a pot of paint and touch it back. The red I leave alone. It hasn't faded a shade in ninety years, and on wet mornings like this one it looks freshly wet itself, which is the only reason the lodgers keep coming back. Now, the kettle's on. Mind the stair on your way down.