Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses with buds and leaves

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open roses with layered petals, one larger on the left and one on the right, joined by stems, leaves and small closed buds. The linework is dark and precise, with hatching and cross-hatching used to shade the petals and leaves. The image is black and grey on a plain white background, with the arrangement spread horizontally across the frame.

Botanical Rose Flower Bud Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second rose took me three weeks, and Mrs Okafor said it looked like a rose that had been told a secret and was pretending not to know it. I did not argue. She was paying by the hour and she had a good eye for a cheat.

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The trouble with cross-hatching is that it is honest. Every line you put down stays down. I had shaded the left-hand bloom so many times its petals had the grey weight of wet slate, and when I held the sheet up to the window of the cottage on Thornley Lane, the light came through only where I had been lazy. So I went back in with a finer nib and drew the dark only where the petals folded over themselves, the places a real flower keeps its shadows.

She came for the drawing on the last Saturday of October, bringing a jar of quince jelly and a pencil tin that had belonged to her husband. She turned the sheet to the lamp for a long time. Then she tapped the smaller bud at the end of the right-hand stem, the one I had almost left blank.

"That one is still closed," she said. "Good. Leave it closed. Somebody should have a reason to come back."

I kept the quince jelly and gave her the drawing rolled in brown paper, and I still have the nib I used on the bud, bent slightly at the tip from pressing too hard on the last stroke.