Black and grey dotwork tattoo design of two open roses with buds and leaves on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses with buds and leaves

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of two open roses, one partly behind the other, with two closed buds and several serrated leaves arranged around them. The petals are drawn in bold black outline, with the inner folds and shadowed areas filled with fine stippled dots. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background with no body placement visible.

Dotwork Botanical Rose Bud Leaf Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out of Valparaíso the cutting in the biscuit tin had two buds, and you were the only one aboard willing to say so out loud. Mr Okonedo the bosun called it a bit of green string. The cook said roses never survived salt air. You wedged the tin against the galley stove, where the heat could reach it, and checked it before every bell.

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Evenings you worked with a sail needle and a bottle of Indian ink borrowed from the chart room, pricking tiny dots into a drawing you'd made on the back of a tide table. Petals first, outlines last, because the outline is what the eye trusts. The swell kept sliding the ink across the page, so you learned to rest your wrist on the rail and breathe between each dot. Somebody always asked what it was for, and you always said later.

Off the Lizard the first bud split. By morning it had opened enough to show its ruffled heart, and a second, tighter bud had unfolded behind it like a sailor turning over in his bunk. You sat on the hatch cover with the drawing on your knee and saw that the page was only a rough copy of what lay in front of you, two roses crowding each other for light.

When the pilot cutter came alongside off Falmouth, you gave the tin to the chandlery boy going ashore with the mail and told him to keep it out of the sun. He asked what the flowers were for. You told him the truth, that you had drawn them for a voyage that was nearly over, and that the rest was up to the soil.