Black ink dotwork sketch of two roses with shaded leaves, drawn on white paper in a spiral sketchbook as a tattoo design.

Two roses dotwork flash sketch

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of two roses, one open at the top and one lower and angled to the right, with pointed leaves around both blooms. The petals and leaves are built from fine black dots and thin outlines, with denser stippling in the shadowed areas. The sketch sits centred on a white page in an open spiral sketchbook, with a black Sharpie pen lying beside it.

Dotwork Botanical Rose Leaves Sketch Flower

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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

Pull your chair nearer the range, love, it's the only warm thing left in this house. You'll want the roses. Everybody does. Two bushes went in against the south wall of Gull Rest the spring the Hendry sisters came down from Bradford with one tin trunk between them. Ada planted the high one. Lil planted the low one and angled it toward the harbour so she could watch the boats from the scullery window.

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They quarrelled the way sisters do, over the price of coal and who had let the bread go stale, and they did it in dots. Ada kept a dressmaker's pin dipped in soot, and she pricked the shadows into every petal she could reach, on the back of the menu cards, on the wallpaper behind the piano, until the roses looked like they were standing in sea fret. Every guest who left without paying got another dot from Ada. Every one Lil forgave got a leaf.

The great gale came in February, the kind that takes slates and then starts on the chimneys. In the morning the high rose had lost its crown, and Ada had not spoken a word since the night before. Lil found her out on the wet steps at six, still in her nightdress, staring at the bare stalk. Neither of them said sorry. Lil went back in and came out with the twine, and they tied the low bush's longest cane up to the high one's broken arm, one knot each, pulling tight with their teeth.

By the summer the two bushes had grown into each other so thickly you couldn't tell which leaves belonged to which. The guests never did work out which sister had planted what. I've stopped trying myself. I just put the kettle on when the boats come in.