Black and grey realism rose tattoo on the upper arm of a person in a dark grey t-shirt and distressed denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photo of a person seated with legs crossed, wearing a faded dark grey t-shirt and distressed light denim shorts, with a white fluffy blanket or dog beside them. A black and grey rose tattoo with soft shading sits on the upper arm, partly visible below the t-shirt sleeve, and extends toward the elbow. The colour is limited to black and greys, and the composition is informal and natural.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Rose

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 mountain road ran so close to the frontier that the guard at Harrow Pass could hear goats arguing on both sides of the wall. Every spring a cart came over from the lowland village of Sedd with cuttings wrapped in wet sacking, and every spring the guard, a man called Dov Ferrant, made the carter unwrap each bundle on the trestle table and count the thorns.

Keep reading

One year the carter was a widow named Ilse Marrow, and she brought only a single briar in a clay pot. Dov asked what it was for. She said it was for her husband's grave on the far side. He had wanted a red rose, she said, but nothing red would take in the pass. Everything grown up there came out the colour of soot and stone, from the rain that fell through the smoke of the charcoal burners. Dov told her roses were not contraband. She said the rose was not the thing he ought to be checking for. He looked at the pot a long time, then took up his pen.

He wrote her name in the ledger and beside it, in small letters, one rose, admitted. He stamped her papers and waved her down the road. The plant bloomed that June in a bed of grey gravel, its petals dark and shaded at the edges like ash on paper, and the widow said it was exactly what her husband had sketched in his book the winter before he died.

The next spring the guard found that the carters from Sedd had stopped bringing sacking. They carried their cuttings loose in their arms, and he let them pass without a word. By the following winter there were grey roses growing along both sides of the wall, and nobody at Harrow Pass could say which side had planted them first.