Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, small wildflowers and leaves covering the inner forearm.

Black and grey roses and wildflowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dense cluster of two large roses sits among smaller five-petalled wildflowers, buds and leafy stems, running from the wrist up towards the elbow. The work uses clean outlines with shaded petals and leaves, giving depth through layered grey tones. The tattoo fills the frame vertically, with the wrist and a knitted sweater visible at the edges.

Botanical Forearm Rose Wildflower Leaf Bud Petal Floral

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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

Shift your boots nearer the grate and mind the snow melting off your collars, because I'll not start until the floor is dry under my stool. You all came in off the Hexham road with drifts to your knees, so you'll have the patience for a winter story.

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Up beyond the Scarth wall there was a cottage with a garden walled in grey stone, and in it grew two great roses, one old and one young, that Widow Maud Ferrier had planted the year her husband went to sea. Among them, stitched through the leaves like thread through linen, ran the wild dog roses with their five pale petals, and the bees that came for them never once touched the cultivated blooms. The village said the garden was lucky. The village also said Maud was mad, because she would not cut a single bud before the first frost.

The frost came early that year, then the snow, and the lane vanished so completely that the carter drove his cart into the beck. Her grandson Tam came up the hill with a spade, sure she'd lost the roses, and found her kneeling in the drift, scraping snow back from the wall with her bare hands. Every stem she had left standing was still green at the root. She told him a rose only dies when it is given up on, and that a wildflower will open under anything if it has been asked properly.

Tam thought she was talking about the garden. He understood years later, when spring came, that the drifts lifted the same morning, and the first thing to open on the whole fell was a dog rose on that wall, pale as the snow it had come through. Pass the jug round, and mind the cold on your way up to bed.