Black and grey rose tattoos cover the upper arm and forearm of a person with long auburn hair, standing on rocks by the sea.

Black and grey rose sleeve on a raised arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person stands on rocky ground with one arm raised overhead, showing a sleeve of black and grey roses across the upper arm and forearm. The roses are rendered with soft shading and fine detail, with darker tones for depth. The sea and pale sky fill the background, and the composition is cropped so the face is hidden by hair.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Rose Sea Rock Bikini Hair

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

Nobody in Porthgwidden could agree on how the roses came to grow out of the black rock at Gull Stack, only that they had been there longer than the chapel. Old Hannah Tregear said her grandmother had pushed the first cutting into a crack with her thumb on the morning the lifeboat went out and did not come back, because she had no spade and no patience left.

Keep reading

The sea took the men, as it takes men, and kept the boat as well. For a whole winter the women went down to the stack at dusk and tied strips of red wool to the bushes, because the sea was said to be jealous of anything it could not drown. Each spring the roses flowered anyway, and each spring the petals were a shade darker, until they looked like the inside of a mussel shell in shadow.

Then a stranger came along the coast road with a case of brushes and a bottle of ink, asking leave to draw the stack for a map. He stayed three days. On the third he climbed down to the ledge at low water and found the roses thick along the rock, their thorns hooked into the stone like fingers. He asked what one would cost. Hannah's mother told him the roses were not for sale, and that the sea would take whatever it liked from a man's hands if he gave it nothing first.

He laughed and went back up the path. The map he posted to the harbour office had the stack drawn in, and beside it a single rose, shaded so finely that Hannah's mother held it to the window and swore the petals were still wet. The red wool stayed on the bushes that year, and nobody tied on a new strip.