Black and grey realistic rose with leaves tattooed along the inside of a forearm, with the hand hanging loosely in the foreground.

Black and grey rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open rose with layered petals and several leaves wraps around the outer forearm, running from the elbow area toward the wrist. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with smooth grey shading and soft highlights, giving depth and a realistic finish. The arm is photographed against a dark, blurred background, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Flower Botanical

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 mortar had given up on the north wall of Hallowdene years ago, so the rose had taken it over instead. Ada Pell knelt in the nettles below it with her sketchbook on one knee and a stub of graphite she kept sharpening with a penknife, trying to get the shadow inside the bloom right. Grey was the only colour she had ever been allowed to work in, her father used to say, because the rest of the garden was for people who could afford to be wrong.

Keep reading

The bloom was an old damask pink gone to dusk on the paper, its petals folded over one another like letters nobody had opened. Leaves ran down the stone in threes and fives, glossy wherever the light caught them, and a thorny stem curled round a loose block as if it meant to keep it from falling. Ada had counted eleven heads on the wall that morning. Her brother Tom, who sold lorry parts in Berwick, said the castle was only good for pigeons and bad decisions, and he was half right about the pigeons.

The estate agent came on Thursday with a folder and a clipboard and asked whether the rose was a feature. Ada said it was a tenant. That afternoon she took a cutting with the secateurs her grandmother had left her, wrapped the green stem in damp newspaper and tucked it inside her coat, the way you would carry a letter you were not yet ready to post.

By the time the train reached Newcastle the paper had dried at the edges and the stem had bent to the shape of her ribs. She drew the leaves again on the back of a ticket, shading each one a shade darker, until the sketch looked less like a memory of the wall and more like the wall itself, still holding on.