Line drawing flash design of three lilac-shaded roses with grey leaves beside the lettering "We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness" and the numerals I-XVII-MMXV, shown on a white

Roses with quote lettering design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A flash design of three roses in soft lilac wash with fine grey shading, surrounded by dark grey leaves. To the right, the quote "We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness" is set in a plain black serif-style lettering, with the numerals I-XVII-MMXV beneath it. The composition is a cluster of roses on the left balanced against centred text on the right, all on a plain white background.

Botanical Lettering Rose Leaf Quote Lettering Roman numeral

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

Nell Harrow cut the last of the lilac roses before the fog came up off the harbour, then carried them through the walled garden in a zinc bucket, the stems knocking her shins at every step. Beyond the wall the boats were settling onto the mud. She did not look towards the breakwater. The lighthouse had been dark since the bulb failed in March, and the council had stopped answering her letters about it.

Keep reading

Her father had grown these roses against the south face of the chapel, from a cutting his mother smuggled out of Dieppe in a biscuit tin. He wrote the names on slate tags in pencil: Mercy, Verity, and one he would only call Wren. Nell kept the tags in a biscuit tin of her own. She had never mastered his handwriting, only learned to trust it.

On the night of the regatta a boy from the chandlery came to the gate with a torch and asked whether the roses were for the wake. She said they were for whoever needed them. He lit the path up the hill to the churchyard, and at the lych gate he stopped, because the lighthouse had come on. One slow white beam swept across the water, and nobody had sent for an engineer.

"Someone's found the switch," he said. Nell laid the roses on the stone, three of them, and the fog thinned enough to show the harbour wall, pale as the petals. Below, the beam turned again and again, finding each boat in its turn and letting it go, and she stood there until the bucket was empty and her hands smelt of green sap and salt.