Black and grey realistic roses with leaves covering the shoulder and upper back of a person wearing a dark top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo of two roses with leaves wraps from the upper back over the shoulder and onto the upper arm. The larger rose on the back has soft, stippled shading and defined petal edges, and the smaller rose on the shoulder is shaded in deeper tones. The photograph is taken from behind, cropped at the head, with the dark top framing the design against the skin.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Back Rose Leaves 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 grey rose never made it into the Harrow catalogue, because my father would not sell a plant he could not name. He called it the Widow's Tea, after the woman in Wenham Lane who first gave him the cutting over a garden fence, wrapped in a damp copy of the Eastern Daily Press. It had no colour anyone could agree on. In June the petals came up the shade of wet slate, and the leaves went the green of a dropped penny.

Keep reading

I drew it that winter with a stub of carpenter's pencil on the backs of old invoices, because the ink kept freezing in the potting shed. Every petal I stippled with the tip of a pin, dot after dot, until the paper went soft as a moth's wing. Dad said I was wasting paper. He said a rose needs shadow to be believed, and its edges must stay sharp or the whole thing dissolves into weather. So I pressed harder on the rims and let the centres fade back into the grain.

The Widow came to see the drawing in February, her hands buried in a fur muff. She turned the invoice over, studied the roses for a long time, then tapped the smaller bloom in the corner where I had pressed too hard. 'You've caught the one that wouldn't sit still,' she said. 'Plant it where the light goes last, and don't tell your father what it's worth.' Dad was already ringing the bell for tea.

We planted it by the back step that March, the drawing folded into the hole beneath the root ball, because she insisted a rose should keep its own likeness to hold on to. The first bloom came in June and was exactly the grey of my pencil. I have spent thirty years trying to mix that colour in a tin and never managed it, and the Widow never once sent a bill.