Black line drawing flash of two traditional-style roses with leaves, designed as a tattoo stencil.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses with leaves line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open roses stacked diagonally, one above and one below, with curled leaves at their sides and tips. The outlines are bold, even black lines with fine interior lines marking the petal folds, and there is no shading or fill. The plain white background and centred composition make it read clearly as a design sheet.

Traditional Botanical Rose Leaf 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

In the year the Pennick orchard failed to fruit, Mags Tennant walked the rows at dusk with a basket she never filled. Two rose bushes grew at the far end, on the bank where the old wall had fallen, one growing above the other, and they had bloomed twice that summer when nothing else would.

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Her neighbour Hal Dudd came to the gate with his cap in his hands. He said the roots were drinking the trees dry and that she should cut the upper bush before the frost. He looked at the top bloom, a cupped thing with its outer petals rolled back like a skirt lifted out of a puddle. "Cut the top one and the bottom will go," he said. "Roses are like that. They share the water."

Mags said nothing. She went into the lean-to and came back with a pot of ink and a fine brush, and she painted a thin black line round the petals and the curled leaves of each bush, the way her mother had taught her to mark a graft so the wrong wood would not get cut. By morning the lines had dried hard, and the leaf tips had curled as if they had been told to hold their shape.

Hal did not cut the bushes. At Michaelmas the lower rose opened fully, and the upper one kept its bloom into the first frost, folds sharp as paper. Hal took his apples to market that year and came back empty-handed to the gate. He never asked her why she had drawn them, but each spring after, he left a cutting by her gate, wrapped in wet sacking, and went away without a word.