Realistic black and grey rose tattoo with leaves and a bud across a woman's shoulder and upper back, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses across a shoulder and back

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three roses, one open bloom and a second rose with a partly visible bud, with leaves and stems spreading across the shoulder blade. The roses are rendered with soft grey shading, fine tonal gradients and sharp dark accents in the petal folds and leaves. The pair of photographs shows the same design from slightly different angles, with the skin shown without a face in frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Back Rose Rose bud Leaves Stem 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 fairground lorries had been parked on the Kent marsh since Tuesday, and by Friday the rain had got into everything. Dora Hale sat on an upturned crate behind the Waltzer, a jam jar of grey wash at her knee, and worked shading into a rose she had been painting on the car door for three seasons. Her father had painted the first one in 1952. He mixed his greys from soot and cold tea, and he used to say a rose in monochrome was harder than a rose in colour, because you had to find the light using nothing but the dark.

Keep reading

Terry Lusk, the new boy on the generator, leaned on the rail and watched her brush. "Your dad's roses are on every car," he said. "Why's this one different?" She tipped her head at the door, where the second bloom sat half open, its bud tucked behind like someone keeping a secret. "He never painted a bud that was about to go over," she said. "Everything he did was at its best. I wanted one that was still deciding."

Terry went off to see to the lights. Dora stayed until the sky over the marsh turned the colour of her wash, pressing the darkest accent into the fold of the lower petal with the tip of a sable. When she stood, her knees cracked, and the rain had started again, soft on the canvas roof of the ticket booth. She left the jar uncovered so the wash would thicken overnight, then walked the length of the field to check the towing hitch.

In the morning the lower bloom had settled darker at its edges where the paint had pooled, and she decided that would do for now.