Realistic black and grey rose tattoo with shaded petals and a small leaf on the inner wrist and forearm of a person with white-tipped nails.

Black and grey rose on the wrist

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic rose in full bloom sits on the inner wrist, with its outer petals opening around a tightly curled centre. The shading moves from soft greys to deep black at the edges, giving the petals a sense of volume, and a small dark leaf and thin stem sit at the lower right. The rose is centred on the wrist against a plain, dark background, with the hand and fingers visible below.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Leaf 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 mortar had gone soft in the wet spring, and Hetty Moss was still picking grit from her knuckles when the steward came down the north stair with a lantern and a question about the roses. Nobody had pruned the walled garden since the old Lady Ashcombe died. Hetty had found the bush by accident, a tangle of canes pushing through a breach in the curtain wall, its flowers gone the grey of wet slate.

Keep reading

"They're meant to be red," the steward said, holding the light close. "The old lady had them shipped from Ghent."

Hetty cut the first bloom at dusk and carried it up to the chapel ruin, where the roof had given way decades back and the sky came straight down onto the flagstones. She set it on the altar step. The petals were tight, curled inward like a fist, and when she breathed on them they gave off a smell of rain and iron. Nothing about it looked like a flower that wanted to be seen.

By morning the steward had sent for the bailiff, and the bailiff had sent for a man from town with a box of brushes, who said the bush was blighted, a sort of smut that ate the colour out of things. He offered to burn it. Hetty said nothing. That night she went back alone, wrapped a cutting in wet sacking, and walked it down the hill to the cottage at Lower Wrenfield, where she planted it against the south wall and waited for something red to come.

It never did. Ten years on, the cutting had grown into a grey crown taller than the door, and people came from three villages to stand beneath it, and not one of them asked why the petals were the colour of ash. Hetty had stopped minding. Some roses, she had decided, simply remember a different fire.