Black and grey full arm sleeve of realistic roses and flowers on an upper arm and forearm, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey rose sleeve

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of roses and smaller flowers with leaves and foliage fills the arm from shoulder to wrist. The roses are shaded in soft greys with fine detail, set against dark, densely packed background filler. The photo is shown as three side-by-side views of the same arm, with a black top visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Foliage Sleeve

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 rose garden behind St Aidan's shuts its gate at ten, but the night sister says porters can cut through if they bring back the bins. You are on the late run from Ward Nine when the lift stalls between floors, and an old man in a tartan dressing gown is already sitting on the trolley with a sketchbook open on his knee. The lights flicker, then steady, and he doesn't look up from the page.

Keep reading

He is drawing roses in pencil. Fat, heavy-headed blooms, each petal shaded until the edges go the colour of wet slate, and around them a crowd of leaves and small flowers pressing in so tightly that the paper underneath is nearly black. "Every one is from the garden," he says. "Forty-one years I've tended that bed. I've never once got the dark right."

The lift jerks and you both grab the rail. He tells you his wife planted the first bush the year their daughter was born, and that the trust wants the whole bed cleared for a car park by spring. You don't promise him anything. You just sit with him, passing the pencil back when he drops it, until the engineer's voice crackles through the grille and the doors finally part.

At seven, when your shift ends, you walk out through the gate that isn't locked after all. The bush has one bloom left, almost white in the grey light, and the foliage around it is still beaded with dew. A thorn catches your cuff as you reach past it, then lets go, and you stand there a long time without picking anything.