Pencil drawing of three shaded realistic roses as a tattoo design, with a hand resting at the lower left edge of the sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three shaded roses on drawing paper

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of three open roses on white paper, one large rose in the centre with two smaller roses at the upper left and right. The petals are built up with soft grey shading and fine pencil linework, with a faint pinkish tone at the petal edges. A pencil lies across the top right of the sheet, and a hand with partly visible finger markings rests at the lower left.

Realism Botanical Hand Rose Flower Pencil drawing

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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

Sit down, the kettle's only just gone off and I'm not standing for another story till you've had a cup. You'll want the one about the roses on the drawing sheet, because everyone who comes through that door asks about the roses, and nobody ever asks about the pencil.

Keep reading

Ada Pyle drew for a seed merchant on Wine Street in Bristol, back when catalogues were still printed by hand and a woman was paid by the petal. She had three roses to do that spring. The first two came easy, a pale white climber from a nursery in Somerset and a little pink cabbage rose her mother used to keep in a jam jar. The big one in the middle was another matter. It was meant to be the striped rose the merchant swore by, but every time Ada shaded its outer petals the grey went muddy, like rain on a wet pavement.

She worked on it three nights. On the third, a boy came up from the docks with word that his father had gone under a cart, and Ada put down her pencil, pulled on her coat and went. She was gone until morning. When she came back the sheet was on the desk, the pencil lying across the top corner where she had left it, and the big rose was finished. Somebody had shaded every fold with a steady hand and a light touch, exactly the way she would have done it, only with more patience than she had that week.

Her mother had been dead ten years by then. Ada never asked the merchant who had done it, and he never said. She still keeps that sheet in a card folder under her bed, and she tells people the pencil was hers and the hand was hers too, because a woman who has sat up all night sometimes draws better when she has stopped trying to.