Black and grey realism style dahlia with leaves tattooed on an upper arm, with a drawn dragon flash sheet in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dahlia on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large dahlia bloom with layered petals and several leaves is tattooed on the upper arm. The petals and leaves are shaded in soft greys with fine linework and dark accents, giving them volume. Behind the arm, a black and white line drawing of a dragon and a mask sits on a flash sheet, and the photograph contains no colour ink.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Dahlia Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 judges came round at dusk with their torches and clipboards, and Mrs Pruett stood guard over her scarlet cactus dahlias like a woman minding a bank. Mine sat at the end of the trestle in a jam jar of rainwater, the bloom as wide as a dinner plate, its petals stacked like wet paper and shaded from pewter at the rim to near-black at the heart. Dad had been stringing bulbs along the dodgems all afternoon, and still found time to tell me the dark ones always lose in a tent full of lamps.

Keep reading

Judge Harrow took his time. He lifted the bloom by its stem, turned it towards the bulb, and tilted his head the way the tattooist in the end caravan tilted his when checking a line. That man had a sheet of flash pinned inside his door, a dragon coiled round a horned mask with every scale hatched in neat rows, and he'd told me once that greys are harder than colour because you must decide what the light is doing before you touch the needle. I had decided. The leaves, the shadow under each petal, the faint white crease where the bloom folded in on itself. I had spent a whole summer deciding.

The rosette went to Mrs Pruett, and I was glad for her, honestly. But Harrow stopped by the trestle on his way out, bent down, and said the thing I've kept: 'Nobody else thought to leave the dark in.' Then the rain came, the lamps dimmed along the midway, and I walked back through the wet grass to the field, where a row of dahlias stood in the mud, every one of them shining grey in the dark.