Black line drawing of two roses with leaves and a long stem on a white background, a botanical tattoo design sketch.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses with leaves line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two roses, one partly behind and above the other, with layered petals drawn in outline. Leaves and a long thin stem extend across the lower half of the composition. The linework is dark and even with no shading, colour or fill, so the design is shown in outline only on plain white paper.

Botanical Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem Flower Petal

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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

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Ashgrove House had planted anything in twenty years, so when Mrs Okafor's tea rose came up through the cracked planter on the east walkway, the lads from the flats below started calling it a miracle. I called it a weed until it had buds on it.

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It was a bush rose, pale pink going to cream at the edges, and the second one came up the spring after, from a root the first had sent sideways under the railings. By June the second had climbed behind the first and was pushing its head above the balcony rail, so you could see it from the car park with the sun behind. The petals stacked like the folded collars of a good coat, each one curling back on itself, and the stem ran down the brickwork in a line thin as fishing wire, hunting for soil.

I went up with a bucket and a pair of secateurs, meaning to cut them both back before the council came round with their clipboard. Mrs Okafor was on the bench in her dressing gown, a flask between her knees. "Leave them," she said. "They are not finished growing yet."

So I left them. In August the front rose dropped its petals onto the walkway in a ring, and the back one kept opening, bud after bud, until the whole face of the block had a spot of colour on it that nobody had asked for. The council sent a letter about the planter. I never answered it.