Black and grey shaded rose with swirling scrollwork tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, shown beside a white top and leopard print fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose and scrollwork on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a torso shows a large tattoo of a rose with shaded petals, set among swirling scrollwork and leaf-like forms on the side of the ribcage. The linework is dark and the shading is soft, rendered entirely in black and grey ink. The composition includes a navel piercing, a white top and leopard print fabric around the tattoo.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Scrollwork Leaves 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

Sit down by the sundial, and mind the loose gravel, because this story has been kept a long time and wants a cool bench. Old Maud Ferrier kept the walled garden at Hollin Bank, and in the summer of the flood she had one rose left standing on the south wall, a climber nobody had planted on purpose. It had come up through a crack in the mortar with no colour at all, only the shades of pencil and rain.

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The village said the grey rose was a bad omen, and the vicar wanted it pulled. Maud would not have it. She knelt in the wet with a tin of soot and a sable brush, and every evening she painted the leaves in dark, quick strokes, scrolling the stems out along the bricks like the ironwork on a gate. Her nephew Tom came up from the mill to tease her. 'Nobody can see a grey rose from the lane, Aunt,' he said. She told him the lane was not where the roses were looking.

The turn came when the water went down. Maud found the rose had lifted a whole brick from the wall, and tucked behind it was a tin box holding a letter in the same soft shading, so faint you had to tilt it to the lamp to read. It was from her sister, who had gone to sea forty years before and never once sent a stamp. The letter said only that the garden would keep what the family could not carry.

So when the rain comes now, you will see the wall go dark where the scrollwork runs, and the bloom opening pale at its centre like a lamp turned low. Pass me that cup, would you? Some things only show their colour when you stop looking for it.