Back view of a person with a black and grey stippled rose tattoo on the back of the hand and a heart tattoo on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on the hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A rear view of a person with one hand resting at the back of their hip, showing a black and grey rose tattoo on the back of the hand that extends toward the wrist. A dark heart design with a smaller motif sits on the upper arm, and the person wears a black t-shirt with a skeleton hand graphic and black jeans. The rose uses fine dotted shading and the photo is set against a plain, pale background.

Dotwork Hand Upper arm Rose Heart Hand

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

Mrs Edith Pardoe had never liked the sound of a pen scratching, so she worked with a fine steel nib and a pot of iron-gall ink, pricking one tiny point after another until a petal rose out of the paper. Her husband called it a waste of good evenings. The engravers down in Sheffield called it cheating, because a line could be cut in an afternoon and a dot took a week.

Keep reading

Tonight the rose on her board was the last of six for the Hallam Seed Company, and the rest of the house had gone to bed. The gas hissed low. Outside, a tram bell rang twice on Fulwood Road and then the street went quiet, the kind of quiet that makes a hand feel loud. She had packed the outer petals with dense stipple and thinned it toward the centre, where the light was meant to sit, and she had left one small white hollow there for the bloom to open into.

At eleven a knock came at the back door. Her nephew Tom stood on the step with a parcel in brown paper and a face that said he had been running. The agent had sent a boy with a note: the client wanted the roses in grey, not black, and by Monday.

She studied the board, then the dots, and laughed until she had to sit down. Grey was only black with the dots spaced further apart. She dipped the nib, thinned every mark by half, and left the hollow untouched, the one place on the petal where nothing had been asked of the ink.