Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a woman with closed eyes surrounded by roses, buds and leaves, drawn in black linework on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and roses tattoo sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a woman with her eyes closed, her head tilted back and her arms wrapped around a large rose at the centre. Roses, rose buds and leaves fill the composition, with a rose at the lower left and another at the lower right. The sketch uses fine pencil outlines and soft grey shading on a pale paper background, and there is no colour.

Botanical Woman Rose Rose bud Leaves 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

The nursery order book had Mrs Pargeter's name against the climbing rose on the south wall, and the rose had not flowered in eleven years. Ada Pargeter wanted it drawn before the builders came, so the catalogue could keep what the wall would not. I was nineteen and had only ever drawn cabbages and pears for the seed trade, but my pencils were sharp and my father had sent me.

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Each morning I sat on an upturned crate and worked from the bud outward. Ada brought tea in a cracked cup and talked about the young men who had planted that wall in 1902, most of them gone to France and never back, and about the one who had pressed a single bloom into her hymn book. She never said his name. I drew the thorns, the hard green hips and the leaves that curled at their edges, and the paper took the shadows better than I expected, grey as river mud after rain.

On the ninth morning the rose opened in the night, all at once, the way Ada said it always had. The pale petals had folded over one another into a heavy cup, and the bees had not yet found it. I stopped drawing. Ada laid her hand across the sheet so lightly that the pencil smudged beneath her fingers, and she said I had got the shape wrong. It was not a bloom that wanted to be looked at. It wanted to be kept.

I finished the drawing from memory the month the wall came down. The roses went to the skip, the plate went into the catalogue under a number, and the original sheet is still in my drawer, with a faint grey thumbprint in one corner where Ada pressed it, as if she had meant to hold the rose still for a moment longer.