Black and grey drawing of three roses with leaves, a strand of beads and two diamond shapes, arranged on a diagonal as a tattoo design.

Three roses with beads and diamonds

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three open roses at different sizes, linked by a diagonal strand of round beads, with two faceted diamond shapes between them. The roses are outlined with bold linework and shaded with stippling and grey tones, with small leaves at the top and lower left. The design is shown in black and grey on a pale background, with the elements spread from the top right down to the lower left.

Traditional Rose Bead Diamond Leaves

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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

Shut that flap, lad, the rain's come sideways off the fish stalls and it's in my good boxes. No, sit where I can see you. You want the one about the roses or the one about the bead man? The roses, then. Everyone wants the roses.

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Mrs Adair kept three in a tin bath behind the wet fish, the big one at the back where the sun got in before the gulls, a middling one, and a small one she kept by the gutter because it liked to be rained on. She'd never let a soul pick them. When Mr Pell came down with his string of grey pearls and offered her a week's loaf for the lot, she laughed so hard the bath rocked.

"Then give me the diamonds," she said, and he did, because he always did. They were nothing, really, chips of old shop glass he'd swept from the kerb after the jeweller's shutter went up, but in the rain they threw the lamplight about like they'd been paid for it. She strung them between the roses on a slant, bead, bead, glint, bead, the way a woman walks down a street she owns.

Mr Pell died the winter after, and the strand came to me in a paper bag with one bead missing. Mrs Adair never said where she'd lost it. The small rose went first, rained out by the gutter. The big one is still at the back, I'm told, though nobody's seen it since the council moved the market.

So when you hear the rain tapping on the tin, lad, count the beads. There's always one fewer than you expect.