Black and grey botanical tattoos of flowers and leaves on a woman's upper arm and forearm, photographed from behind in a black backless dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey floral tattoos on arm and forearm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black backless dress is photographed from behind against a pale grey background. A large shaded floral tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder area, and a smaller dark floral piece sits on the forearm. The work uses black and grey shading with soft tonal gradients, and the composition centres the tattoos against the plain backdrop.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Flower Floral Leaves Woman

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 officer at the far booth has already lifted the lid of your holdall before you finish saying good morning. Inside, wrapped in wet kitchen roll and a freezer bag, are eleven rose cuttings your grandmother took from a wall in Lisbon forty years ago, and you know exactly how they look to a man with a torch: sticks, mud, nothing worth a form.

Keep reading

He asks what they are. You tell him the truth, which is that they are black roses, which is not quite true, because the bloom she grew was a deep maroon that went almost to ink in the evenings. Still, the word sits right. He turns a stem over in his gloved fingers and the leaves catch the strip light, dark and deckled at the edges, veined like something drawn slowly with a fine nib.

Then he asks for the name on the packet. There is no packet. You say the name aloud, the one she wrote in pencil on the back of a photograph, and he writes it down, and you watch him copy it letter by letter into a box marked other.

He hands the bag back with the cuttings still damp. Outside, the car park is grey and the sky has the same flat pale wash as the paper you wrapped them in. You set the holdall on the passenger seat and buckle it in, like a child, before you drive.