Greyscale pencil drawing of a realistic open rose with curling leaves, designed as a tattoo flash for a botanical piece.

Shaded rose with leaves in pencil

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A single open rose is drawn at the centre, with its outer petals curling outwards and a tighter bud forming in the middle. Surrounding it are several pointed leaves and thin curling stems, all rendered in soft graded pencil shading with fine dark edge lines. The drawing sits on a pale background with no border or text, and the composition is tall and narrow.

Realism Botanical Rose Leaves Petal Bud Stem

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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

Don't you tell me that rose was grown, Edie Marsh, because it was never grown, it was coaxed, and there's a difference, which you'd know if you'd been up the allotments that frosty morning instead of in your bed.

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It was the spring the Hallam boy came home from Korea with hands that shook too much to hold a brush. His mother begged Mr Pell at the signworks to take him on for anything at all, so he got the shop shutters. Every Saturday he painted a rose on the bakery window, and every Saturday it came out wrong, petals packed too tight, leaves sharp as bread knives. Mr Pell told him a rose wants light from underneath, and nobody paints light from underneath.

So one February dawn he walked up the allotments with a pencil and a sheet of cartridge paper and drew the rose blooming on Ada Cole's back wall. He shaded it slow, grey on grey, the way you breathe on a window to write your name. He sat eleven hours with the frost going off the fences and his tea going cold on the wall beside him. When he came down the path the leaves had curled over the top edge of the paper, as if they wanted a look at the street.

Ada's rose went over that same week, and nobody in Hallam Row could say where the bloom had gone. The bud in the middle of that drawing never opened. His mother pinned it in the front room and it's still there, and every morning the sun comes through the net curtain and lights it from underneath, just as Mr Pell said it should.