Black and grey pencil drawing of a rose in bloom on a long stem with leaves and swirling tendrils, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper with no body part visible.

Shaded pencil rose with curling stem

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A rose in full bloom sits at the top of a long, slender stem with three leaves and two curling tendrils that frame the flower. The petals are shaded with soft graded pencil, with deep darks in the folds and lighter highlights along the edges, and the leaves are rendered with fine hatched veins. The drawing is in greyscale on a pale background with no colour and no body placement shown.

Botanical Realism Rose Stem Leaves Tendril Bud Flower

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 wind had found the gap under the gallery door again, and you were halfway up the iron stair with the oil can when the rose on the sill below started to lean. Mrs Abernethy had planted it in a tin bath the spring before she died, and nobody on Skerrig Point grows anything that doesn't drown within a week, yet there it was, stubborn as a fishwife.

Keep reading

Its bloom opened dark in the mornings, folds deep as wet slate, the edges lifted pale where the salt caught them. She had trained two curling shoots round the window frame like a pair of hands cupped against the glass, and every evening you found them turned a little further toward the lamp room, as if the rose had learned to read the light.

The fog came in at dusk, thick enough to swallow the foghorn's first note. You trimmed the wick, polished the lens until your knuckles ached, and watched the beam sweep out over water you could not see. Somewhere past the Carrow rocks the Mary Lune was overdue, and the sea had gone the colour of pencil lead.

At first light you found the Mary Lune's dinghy on the shingle, its oars still locked, and no sign of the men. You walked back up with salt in your hair and cut the one bloom that had opened in the night, then set it on the lamp room rail where the glass would catch it. It went soft at the edges over the week, and every night after you wound the clock, you looked for its dark heart against the lantern light, the one thing on the point that had stayed where it was put.