Pencil drawing of a shaded rose in bloom with several leaves, shown as a tattoo design on paper with no body part visible.

Shaded rose with leaves pencil drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a full rose in bloom, with its petals curling around a tight centre and surrounded by five or six pointed leaves with visible veining. The petals and leaves are built up with soft grey shading and darker pencil lines at the edges, giving a fairly realistic sense of volume. The drawing sits on plain off-white paper, with the rose placed toward the centre of the frame.

Botanical Realism Rose Leaves Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting had gone soft at the stem by the time we raised the Azores, and Mrs Ashdown, who ran the galley and had no patience for anything that wilted, told me to pitch it over the side. I didn't. I wrapped it in a damp rag, tucked it inside my oilskin and carried it forward to the fo'c'sle like a man smuggling a bird past the mate.

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Harker, the bosun's mate, could draw. He had a stub of graphite he'd sharpened with his clasp knife, and on the back of a spoiled chart he worked the rose out from memory. He shaded the petals darkest where they folded under, and left the heart so tight you had to squint to find where one curl ended and the next began. Five leaves went round it, each vein picked out in a single stroke. "Roses don't sail," he said, blowing the dust off the paper. "So this one has to be made to stay put."

The Horn took us in the third week of March. For four days the galley fire stayed out and the crew lived on hard biscuit and prayer, and the drawing worked loose from its nail and spent a night in the bilge water before I fished it out. The graphite ran. The petals softened into a grey smear and the leaves lost their veins. I laid it flat on the ash-bin lid to dry, half expecting to find nothing there at all.

Instead, when we came round into the Pacific and the sun finally broke through, there was a new leaf on the cutting, pale and folded like a letter. I cut a sliver from the old chart, took Harker's stub from his tin, and went over the empty margin of the drawing until the paper was dark again. Then I pinned it above my bunk, where the new leaf could see it, and told nobody why.