Traditional style flash drawing of a red rose with white highlights, dark green leaves and yellow thorns on a stained paper background.

Traditional red rose flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A painted flash-style drawing of a red rose in full bloom, with its petals outlined in black and edged with white highlights. Dark green leaves with hatched shading and yellow thorn-like accents surround the bloom. The rose is rendered in bold red, pink and white on an aged, mottled tan paper background.

Traditional Rose Leaves Thorn Flower

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

The rose has to climb the spiral stair in a biscuit tin, wrapped in your wet oilskin so the petals do not bruise. By the time you reach the lamp room the gale has found every seam in the glass, and the wind shrieks through the iron like a kettle that will never boil. You set the tin on the chart table, trim the wick, and tell yourself the lamp matters more. It does. It has never once cared what you carried up.

Keep reading

Mrs Pryce at Shelter Cove sold you the cutting in March for two shillings and a promise that you would not let it die. You have kept that promise the way you keep the wick trimmed, without thinking, every morning, with a small ache on the mornings you forget. Its outline is inked thick and black, so it holds its shape against the weather, the way a thing does when someone drew it to last. Its leaves are the deep green of the weed on the lower steps, and its thorns are gold where the light catches them.

The relief boat is late again, and the log has run out of ink, so you write in pencil: wind south-west, force eight, rose still standing. Some nights you talk to it. Some nights you talk to the sea, which is worse company but answers more often. When the tin finally rusts through at one corner, you carry the rose down to the landing and set it in a tar barrel full of rainwater and sand.

Out past the reef a trawler has lost its bearings. You watch its lantern wobble, then steady, then swing toward the only light it can find. Down on the landing, the rose catches your lamp's sweep as it passes, petals bright as a signal flare, and the skipper turns his bow toward the rock. He will never know it was a flower. You will not tell him.