Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, peonies and vines across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Black and grey floral shoulder tattoo

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's shoulder and upper arm carry a black and grey tattoo of roses, peonies and trailing vines, with buds and leaves running down towards the elbow. The linework and shading are fine and detailed, with soft grey tones giving the blooms depth. The tattoo wraps from the collarbone over the shoulder, and the pale skin and dark floral top sit around it against a plain wall.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Peony Flower Vine Leaf Bud

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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 damp came up through the back bedroom at Mrs Pargeter's in the third week of October, and by then you had stopped pretending the stain was a map. It was a bloom instead: a peony the size of a dinner plate, bleeding brown across the paper where the rain had found a seam. You had been sent to Gullhaven to copy botanical plates for a seed merchant in Leeds, grey pencil and a india rubber, nothing in colour, which suited the room well enough.

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The wallpaper in the front parlour had been pink roses on cream once, but someone in the war years had brushed distemper over it and left the back rooms to fade. On a wet Tuesday you worked a palette knife into the corner behind the wardrobe and found more flowers underneath, drawn in grey wash with a stiff brush and shaded so carefully that the petals seemed to curl away from the plaster. Beneath each rose sat a faded pencil name: Lady Hillingdon, Blush Noisette, Old Maiden's Blush. Whoever had written them had catalogued the blooms the way you catalogued your plates.

You copied one each night with the lamp pulled close and the sea working at the groyne below. The vine along the skirting was the hardest, its tendrils doubling back on themselves like handwriting, and on the fourth night you found a line penciled on the last leaf: Tell Ada the buds came out. At breakfast you asked Mrs Pargeter who Ada was. She set down her teacup, looked at the window for a long moment, and said only that the house had been full of girls once.

On Sunday you walked the sea wall to the last cottage in the row, where a rose still climbed the flint by the gate, its cream heads browned at the edges and open anyway. The woman at the door said Ada had gone to Hull in 1946 and never written. You stood there with the drawings rolled under your arm while the tide came up the shingle in long grey sheets, the colour of the wash on the wall, and by dusk the rose was only a darker shape against the stone, still in bloom.