Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, poppies and leaves across the upper arm, shown in colour above and greyscale below.

Black and grey rose and poppy floral arm piece

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of roses, a large open poppy and smaller buds with leaves, arranged in a diagonal sweep across the arm. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with soft grey shading and dark accents for depth. The image is split into a colour photo on top and a greyscale version below, both showing the same black and grey design against a plain white wall.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Rose Poppy Flower Leaves Bud Floral

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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 customs officer at Hallsbridge unrolled the drawing across the steel counter and pinned its corners with two tins of travel sweets. Roses stacked like folded linen, a great open poppy with its centre full of hatched shadow, buds hanging from a stem like lamps not yet lit. Inez Carrow had said it was a design for a garden wall. Tom Aske had checked enough nursery paperwork to know that was not quite true, because nobody drew a garden wall with that much patience.

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"Why flowers?" he asked, not unkindly, tapping the form on his clipboard. She said her grandmother had drawn them every morning from a window above a fishmonger's in Ostend, a pencil worn to a stub, and had never once let the grey go flat. The dark accents where petals folded, she said, were where the light had given up and the flower had to carry on alone.

He was meant to log it as commercial material. Instead he lifted the sheet to the strip light, and the paper went thin as a moth's wing. On the back, faint and pressed hard, were the same poppy and the same leaves, drawn again and again, each attempt a little less certain than the last. Every petal had been rehearsed. He had never seen anyone practise the same flower so many times.

He stamped the box marked personal artwork and slid the drawing back across the steel. She rolled it carefully, tucked it under one arm and walked towards the barrier. At the threshold she glanced back, and for a moment the white wall behind him looked like blank paper on which somebody had decided, once more, to begin.