Black and grey realism tattoo of a rose with water droplets and serrated leaves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose in full bloom, with its spiralled centre and outer petals shaded in smooth greys and deep blacks. Small highlighted droplets sit on the petals, and two serrated leaves appear beneath the flower. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a plain, softly lit forearm.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Water droplet Flower

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 snow had closed the Gallow Pass for nine days, and still Teodor Vane kept climbing, the mule's rope looped over one shoulder and a heel of black bread wrapped in cloth under his arm. Below him the valley was a grey bowl full of chimney smoke. Above him, where the path bent round the shoulder of the rock, there was a single bloom that should not have been alive at that height.

Keep reading

It was a rose, or the shape of one, pushed up through a crack in the stone and sheathed in its own frost. The old women in Sarn said it was the last rose of the Duchess of the Pass, who had sworn to wait for her husband's caravan and had turned to stone with her hands cupped round a flower. Teodor had never believed them. He knelt anyway and brushed the ice from the petals with his thumb, and the meltwater ran cold into the creases of his glove.

The mule would not go nearer, so he went alone. The bloom was grey, not red. Dew stood in beads along each curled petal, and when he leaned close the beads held the light like little windows. In the spiral at the centre he saw his own face, unshaven and thin, and beside it the blurred shape of a woman's hand holding a lantern. He had not heard another living voice on the pass for three days.

He cut the stem below the frost line, wrapped it in the bread cloth, and carried it down to Sarn. He set it in a jug on the inn table and went to sleep with his boots on. When the caravan bells came up the valley at dawn, the jug was empty, and the cloth lay folded on the sill with one dry drop sitting on it like a coin.