Black and grey realism rose tattoo with dark leaves across a shoulder, shown in two photos from different angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose with shaded petals and dark leaves covers the top of the shoulder, shown in a close photo and a side view. The petals use soft grey shading and fine detail to show depth, while the leaves are filled in with bold black. The pale background and light blue top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaves

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

It rained on the Tuesday market for nine days running, and by the ninth the cobbles had gone the colour of wet slate. Old Hannah Pike kept her roses under the canvas at the far end, where the gutter ran over. Nobody else would stand there. The roses she grew were not red. They came up dark as a bruise and kept their grey, shaded like the inside of a shell, and the town said a rose that dark had been born in a bad winter.

Keep reading

A carter came through on the tenth morning, his cart loaded with coal, and stopped because the rain had flattened his hat. He asked her why her petals were so shadowed. She said the sun went out of them early, so they learned to hold what light they had. He laughed and bought one for his wife, who had no use for flowers, and he went off down the hill with it tucked inside his coat.

Hannah sold roses for forty years after that and never once asked for a coin she was owed. People came to the stall to tell her about husbands and debts and the sea. She listened with the water running off her hood and her hands resting among the leaves, which were black and glossy and never wet at the tips, though everything else in the market was soaked through.

On the last day of her trade she shut the canvas early. The gutter was brimming and the cobbles shone. She laid one grey rose on the stone where the carter had stood, and walked home without it, and the market kept it for the next wet week, as markets do.