Black line drawing of two open roses, a rosebud and leaves on a curling vine, shown as a botanical flash design with no body placement.

Two roses and a rosebud on a vine with swirls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open roses and a closed rosebud joined by a twisting stem with several leaves and curled tendrils. The linework is bold, solid black on a white background, with fine interior lines defining the petals and leaf veins. The composition is a tall vertical arrangement with the roses stacked down the stem and no shading or colour.

Botanical Rose Rosebud Leaf Vine Swirl Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Coy stood on the towpath at Bradford-on-Avon with a brush behind one ear and watched the paint on the cabin side go from wet to tacky in the late sun. Her grandfather had started the roses on the doors of Perseverance forty years back, a bud at the top of the vine, two open blooms halfway down, and a tangle of curled tendrils that he said were there to stop the eye running off the edge. She had been told never to change a petal.

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The lock keeper's son, Fred, leaned on the balance beam with a flask and said the boat looked like it was growing. "Bit of ivy on a tin box," he said. Ada didn't answer. She was mixing vermilion with a drop of lamp black, thinning it until it ran like weak tea off the bristles, because the lower rose had faded to brown and she wanted it red again before the boat went up to Stoke Bruerne.

The letter had come on Tuesday from the yard in Gloucester. Her father's name was on it, and so was a sale price, and the word "lot". She had read it three times at the table, then folded it under the teapot where it would stay.

By dusk the lower rose was finished, its inner curls drawn with a rigger brush so fine it barely held paint. She left the bud at the top alone. Somebody else could open that one. She painted a single tendril off the edge of the door, a loose spiral that didn't quite close, and sat back on the gunwale while the light went off the water.