Black and grey rose tattoo with shaded petals and green-grey leaves on the inner wrist of a hand with turquoise nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey rose with shaded petals and dark leaves sits on the inner wrist, with the hand raised and fingers partly visible. The linework is bold and the greys are shaded to give the petals depth, with a few thin stems extending down the wrist. The photograph is taken outdoors against a red brick pavement, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Stem Hand Wrist

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, the same as the one that took your uncle's teeth. Sit there where the wind can't find you. No, the other chair, that one has a spring in it.

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Forty winters back, the rose on the north side of the chapel wall was the only thing on Skerry that wouldn't bow to the gales. Black stems, grey heads, leaves dark as wet slate. Old Mairi Tulloch cut one for her husband the morning the Margaret went under past the Stacks, and she put it in a jar of seawater on the sill because she'd heard roses liked salt. It didn't. It lived anyway, which is the kind of stubbornness the island breeds and then charges you for.

The rose drooped by the Sunday and she was ready to throw it out, but the boy from the mainland came over on the ferry that week with his ink and his needles, painting boats on men's arms for the price of a bottle. She asked him to draw it on her wrist so she'd always have the thing that wouldn't give in, and he did, shading the petals grey as the fog off the sound. When he was done she held her hand up to the lamp and laughed like a girl.

Mind, the rose never did wilt, not on the wall nor on her wrist. And every storm since, when the spray comes over the harbour wall, you'll find a single grey bloom open in the chapel yard, and nobody on Skerry has ever had the heart to pull it up.