A single rose is a textbook romantic gift.

A photograph of a single rose is something nice for decorating the wall space above a water closet.

A drawing of a single rose in bloom, magnified roughly 800%, is a labor not for the impatient or weak of wrist; a rigorous full-brain exercise of constant graphite changes and magnification-error compensation; a vacuum that sucks from one’s blood time and energy and leaves in its place the debris of frustration, sore arms, and the irony that half a tree was spent trying to precisely render the image of a single flower. It is clearly not art but execution without theory or reason, technically impressive but academically limp as the entirety of its purpose exists on the surface of the page. It is not to be given as a gift since the appreciation would surely not be an adequate return on the investment and as a romantic gesture overly cloying and arrogant and odorous of perspiration and pencils and romantic only to a mate with an appreciation of genteel Victorian courtship mores—a rare person of a breed in the offing at the hands and habits of pimps, players, and dance-floor grinders the world over. It is a motherfucking bitch.

A single rose will suffice, I suppose.