Black and grey dotwork and linework flash design of two roses overlapping a large outlined triangle, with leaves, drawn on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses within a triangle design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open roses with leaves, one partly overlapped by a bold outlined triangle that crosses the design. The roses combine clean outline work with stippled dotwork shading on their petals and centres, while the leaves and outer petals are left as open linework. The design is drawn in black ink on a pale background, with a fine-tipped pen lying across the lower left corner.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Rose Triangle Leaf 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

The ghost train's canvas is still wet when Mr Abney hands you the brush and a tin of black gouache, and tells you to stop fretting about the triangle. 'Three sides, one line, you can't get it wrong,' he says, and goes off to argue with the generator man. You have been on the Harvest Glory for six weeks, and this is the first thing anyone has trusted you with that isn't a sack of sawdust.

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The roses are already there, pencilled in the morning light by someone who never signed anything. Two of them, one open wide and one still hiding its middle, with leaves that look as if they might turn over if you breathe on them. The triangle cuts across them like a hand laid flat on a table. You rule it with a batten, pressing so the ink won't bleed into the grain of the card, and it takes the whole afternoon.

Then the stippling. Abney says the dots are the old way, from before the machines got loud, and the trick is patience rather than speed. You sit on an upturned crate with a fine nib and make a thousand small black points, each one a decision about how dark a petal ought to be. By dusk the nearer rose has a centre that seems to hold its breath. You leave the outer petals bare, plain linework, the way he showed you.

When the lamps come on along the midway, Abney stands before the finished board for a long time without speaking. Then he takes the pencil from behind your ear and signs the smaller rose, the one that was already there when you arrived. 'The dots are yours,' he says. 'The rest was his.' You do not ask who his was.