Coloured flash drawing of a vintage sewing machine with a pink rose, dark buds and green leaves, in a neo-traditional style on pale paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing machine and rose design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of an ornate vintage sewing machine with gold scrollwork, a red spool of thread on top, and a large pink rose with dark shading in front. Dark buds and green leaves fill the space around the rose and machine. Bold black outlines and smooth colour blends sit on a light grey background that fades into a soft circular shape behind the design.

Neo-trad Traditional Rose Spool Thread Leaves Bud

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

The treadle had seized again by the third night of snow, so I cranked the wheel by hand and swore at the gold scrollwork for being too fine to hold a drop of oil. Mrs Harrow had given me the kitchen table, the only room in the inn with a fire big enough to keep the thread from snapping. We had no guests left to complain of the racket, only a drover's boy who had walked in off the moor with a torn lining and nowhere else to sleep.

Keep reading

The red spool on the machine's head was nearly bare. I had been hoarding the last of it, cotton bought in Keighley the summer my mother stopped being able to hold a needle, and I had told myself I was saving it for something that mattered. The boy watched me unpick the old hem and said nothing, which I took as permission. I ran a new seam, turned the cuff, and worked a single rose in the corner, stitch by stitch, the petals shading from pale to dark the way she had taught me to do with silk.

When I bit the thread and handed the coat back, he turned the cuff over, found the rose, and went very still. "It's for the lane," I said. "When the hedges are buried, you can find your way by the things people left you." He pulled the wool on and buttoned it to the throat.

By morning the drifts had gone from grey to gold under the first sun. The road beyond the gate showed as a dark line laid straight across the white, and the spool sat empty on the sill where I had left it for Mrs Harrow to find.