Black and grey full sleeve tattoo of a shaded rose, leaves and mandala-style flowers on an arm, in a realism and botanical style.

Black and grey rose and mandala sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded rose with leaves sits at the top of the arm, and mandala-style flowers with fine detail run down the forearm towards the wrist. The work uses dense shading and stippling for the petals and sharp linework for the ornamental flowers, all in black ink and grey. The arm is photographed against a dark sleeve and a blurred background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Geometric Upper arm Forearm Rose Mandala Flower Leaves Sleeve

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the brazier, for I shall not tell this twice. In the kingdom of Ysolde Vale, which lies past the salt marshes and never once appeared on a map worth the vellum, the sun slipped behind the northern peaks one winter and forgot the road home. Roses went grey on their stems. The wells skinned over the colour of pewter. Every sensible person agreed the Vale was finished, except old Marit Cole, who kept a walled garden behind the tannery and would not be told.

Keep reading

Marit had one cutting left, a rose the colour of wet ash that had pushed up through a crack in the tannery wall. She watered it with the black dregs from the dyers' vats, since the well water had gone bitter, and each evening she pressed a soot-dipped pin into the mortar beside it, tracing petal after petal so the plant would have something to copy when the light failed. Her neighbours called it foolishness. Her son called it worse, until one night he came home with frost in his hair and asked her to show him how the petals curled.

Marit's grandmother had carved rings of flowers into the cellar lintel, each one set inside the last like the layers of a shell, and the old tellers said they were maps of the sun's road. Her son spent that winter cutting them into the garden floor, leaf after leaf, until the stones were a field of small sharp suns, and the rose climbed above them, dark and patient.

On the morning of the thaw the rose opened in one swift breath, and the sun came over the peaks as though it had only been looking for a door. Marit's son swore the petals were still grey. I have stood in that garden myself, children, and I tell you the rose has been black ever since. It saw the dark and kept it, and it would rather keep it than let it take the rest of us.