Black and grey pencil sketch of a violin wrapped in ribbons, with two roses and a lily, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Violin with roses and lily sketch

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a violin with its scroll at the top, framed by two roses and a lily at the lower part of the image, with curling ribbons trailing across the composition. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft graded shading on the petals, the violin body and the leaves. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain pale background.

Realism Botanical Rose Lily Ribbon Leaves Music

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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 spruce came from the last stand of old trees in the seed vault under Kessler Ridge, and it had spent nine generations sealed in a crate before it reached my bench on Deck Six. Imre came down the ladder with green thumbs from the roses he was forcing under the lamps and asked why I was being so slow with the top plate.

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Nobody aboard the Meridian had played a violin in my lifetime. The hull hummed one low note, which the engineers called the drive, and the children grew up believing every instrument should sound like that. I carved the scroll first, the way my teacher had, a spiral tight enough to hold a thumbprint. Imre wanted a lily on the lower bout because it was the only flower that had bloomed on the ship without being told to.

Eighteen months later the varnish was hard and the strings were tuned. The night the hydroponics failed and the corridor lights turned amber, I drew the bow across the open G, and a hundred and twelve people came up from their bunks to stand in the passage. Nobody spoke. A ribbon I had tied to the peg lifted in the draught from the vent, and I thought of the sketches I had made on the backs of seed manifests, always the same: a body, two roses, a lily, and a ribbon going somewhere we could not follow.

When the lights came back I cut the ribbon free and tied it round Imre's wrist. He still wears it. The children now ask for the low note every evening, and I play it on the violin, and the hull, for once, sounds like it is keeping time with us.