Black and grey pencil drawing of an open rose with outlined, shaded petals and leaves at the base, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded rose flash design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A open rose bloom is drawn in bold dark outline with soft grey shading on the petals, which curl inward toward a tight centre. Serrated leaves sit at the base on either side of the flower. The drawing is done in pencil and ink on a pale background, with the subject filling most of the frame.

Botanical Traditional Rose Leaves Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't turn round yet, the piano's still warming up and so is Edie Marsh, who has never once walked into the Palais without a rose at her collar. Red, always, pinned on the left where the dress had been let out twice. Nobody asked where it came from. You didn't ask Edie things. The boys who tried ended up on the front steps with their hats in their hands.

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Her sailor, Tom Harrow, had brought that rose back from a harbour town on the Gulf of Lyon, wrapped in a tin of damp sawdust, and the whole hall knew he'd cut it himself from a wall nobody could pronounce. He sailed on the Cordelia the following March and the sea kept what it wanted. Edie kept dancing. Every Saturday she pinned the bloom, and every Saturday its petals sat a little tighter, curling inward on themselves the way a thing does when it's trying to hold its own heart shut.

The last night of the Palais was October, the year they knocked it down for flats. The band played slow. Edie stood from her chair with the rose still at her collar and the room went quiet, because it had never been so still. She didn't dance. She walked out onto the boards, unpinned the flower, and laid it face up in the dip the floor had worn over thirty years of heels.

Then she knelt, set her palm over the bloom as if taking its pulse, and stood without a word. The band kept playing. In the morning the builders found the boards swept and the rose gone, and in the hollow where it had lain, one red petal curled tight as a fist, which the foreman swore was still warm. Sit down now. The piano's started anyway.