Black ink drawing on paper of two shaded roses with leaves, buds and small berries, a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses with leaves and buds design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large open rose on the left and a smaller rose on the right, joined by sprigs of leaves, rosebuds and small berries. The petals are built up with fine hatched linework, with stippled dots and shading giving depth and form. The design is in black ink on a pale paper background, with the main rose placed centrally and the composition running horizontally.

Botanical Fine line Rose Leaves Bud Berry Foliage

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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

You find the sketchbook in the kitchen dresser on the third day, under a tin of tide tables and a bent spoon. The pages smell of paraffin and damp wool. Most of them are lists of lamp oil orders in careful copperplate, but near the back there is a single sheet, folded twice, and on it two roses sit side by side, their stems tangled in sprigs of leaf and small round berries.

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Your father says the cottage belonged to the Pryce family before the Service sold it off, and that the woman who drew these, Nessa Pryce, kept the rose bed alive through forty winters of salt spray. You doubt it. The bushes out back are grey and pruned to knuckles, and the wind off Carrick Sound throws a cupful of seawater over the wall every time the tide turns. Still, you take the shears out in your coat, and by dusk you have three stems tied to a broom handle against the whitewash.

The logbook has an entry in her hand for a night in February: "Lamp turned at midnight. Rose on the left still open at four. Tell it to hold." You read it twice under the brass rail of the lamp room, where the beam sweeps the water every eleven seconds, and you think of her working the big rose by that same light, hatching each petal so the shadowed side sat deep and the lit edge stayed pale.

On the last night before the relief boat, you pin the sheet to the lamp room door. The beam goes round. For a moment, as it crosses the paper, the open rose keeps its white edges, the leaves go dark, and the buds you had never noticed look as though they are waiting for the morning.