Pencil and ink sketch of three shaded roses with leaves and scrolling swirls, drawn as a tattoo design on paper rather than on skin.

Three roses with swirls, design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three open roses grouped together, with leaves and curling scroll lines filling the gaps around them. The petals are outlined in dark ink and shaded with blue-grey pencil to create depth and volume. The composition is a loose cluster across the sheet, with the largest rose at the upper right and the leaves extending outward to the left and right.

Botanical Neo-trad Rose Leaf Swirl Flower Scroll

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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 first thing Dunning taught me in the galley was that a pencil and a bad night make a fair pair. He'd sit on an upturned bucket with the ship's ledger on his knee, shading the margins in blue-grey while the Ellen Marr rolled her shoulders off Flamborough. I thought he was working out the flour order. He was drawing roses.

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They came out in threes, always three, heads bent together like women at a wash-house. The biggest sat in the top corner where the page met the sea-stained cover, its petals folded back over themselves like a rolled sleeve. Leaves spilled out either side. Between them he left curls, scroll lines he said were for the wind to get tangled in, because a boat without a bit of wind in the drawing looks like it's sulking.

On the last night of the season, a letter came aboard in the mail sack. The skipper's wife had written to say the house in Hull was sold and the furniture was gone to a dealer in Beverley. Dunning read it at the range with the kettle hissing and said nothing for a long time. Then he took the pencil and drew a fourth rose, small, half hidden under the others, and rubbed the shading with his thumb until it looked as though it had always been there.

Nobody in the crew asked him about it. In the morning I found the ledger open on the bucket, and the fourth rose had a tiny swirl at its base, curling the way steam comes off a pan when you lift the lid too fast. I've kept that ledger. The fourth rose is still the faintest thing on the page, and it is still the one I look at first.