A sheet of ten black and grey rose drawings on a white background, shaded with fine hatching and stippling in a botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ten black and grey rose flash designs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows ten rose designs arranged in a loose grid, each drawn from a different angle, from open blooms to tight buds. The roses are built up with fine hatched and stippled linework, with heavier dark shading in the petal folds and lighter grey on the outer edges. The drawings are in black ink on white, with no colour and no background elements.

Botanical Realism Rose Flower Petal Bloom 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

Ada Pym kept ten rose cuttings in coffee tins on the ninth-floor balcony of Wrenfield House, because the council had said no soil and she had never once been told no pots. Her husband Walter had carried them up from the allotments in a carrier bag the winter before he died, and they had sulked all year, bare sticks against the grey concrete. The lift broke every second week. Mrs Pym counted the stairs each morning on her way down for the paper: one hundred and four, landing by landing.

Keep reading

Tobias Quaye, from flat 9F, started carrying her shopping up when his mother was on nights. He was seven and wanted to know why she counted. She told him the stairs were the only thing in the building that never argued, and that roses only grew for people who knew exactly how far they had climbed. It was nonsense, but he believed it, the way children believe anything said with a straight face over a bag of potatoes.

That April the first bud split the grey on the third tin. Then nine more came, each in its own hour. One opened like a hand unfolding in the morning, its outer petals curled and paler at the edges, its heart dark where the light never reached. Another stayed tight as a thumb for a fortnight and then gave up all at once. Neighbours came out onto their walkways to look. A man from the fifth floor brought a camera and a bad temper, and went home quiet.

When Ada died in February, the caretaker found the tins still in a row, the roses browning but not yet fallen. Tobias went up the stairs that week, counting under his breath. At the ninth landing he stopped and touched the lowest bloom, which had never closed fully, as if it were still waiting for someone to come up the last flight.