Three black and white rose tattoo designs on a flash sheet, one with dotted shading and leaves, one open bloom with an outlined bud, and one with dotwork shading and leaves.

Three rose designs on a flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three rose designs drawn in bold black outline on white paper. The top rose has a dense, dotted shadow around its petals and a tightly curled centre, while the middle rose is drawn with clean outlines only, with two leaves at the sides. The bottom rose combines stippled dotwork shading on its bud and petals with serrated leaves at each side.

Traditional Dotwork Botanical Rose Leaf Bud Petal

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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

The rose seller at Hallow Lane had three buckets and a rule: never sell a bloom before its bud had opened in the cold. Her daughter Mirren thought the rule was foolish, because the frost came every morning and the roses never waited for anyone. One March, a stranger in a grey coat asked for a rose that would not fade, and the seller laughed and told him to try the bucket by the drain, where the blooms went brown in a day.

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He came back the next week with a leaf he had found pressed inside a book. It was torn at the edges, and the veins were drawn in ink so fine that Mirren had to hold it to the window. The seller turned it over and said that a leaf could hold the shape of a rose, but only if someone had seen the rose first. The stranger shrugged and went off down the lane with his hands in his pockets.

Mirren took the leaf from the table that night and drew the bud on the back of a seed packet, petal over petal, pressing so hard the nib spat. Her mother found it at dawn and said nothing, only set a bucket of water beside the stall and told her to keep watch on it.

By noon the bud had split open on the packet, though the paper had never been wet, and the petals were dotted with the grey of frost. The seller lifted it to the light and sold it to the first customer for a penny, which was exactly what it was worth.