Black and grey realism tattoo of two roses with water droplets, placed on a calf.

Black and grey roses on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large roses stacked vertically, with a third partly visible petal and droplets of water along the stems and petals. The petals are rendered with soft shading, fine tonal gradients and bright highlights that give a lifelike, three-dimensional look. The image is a close, vertical crop of the lower leg against a dark background, with the roses filling most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Calf Rose Flower Water droplet Petal

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 lift in Carrick House had been dead since Tuesday, so Ellis took the stairs with a watering can in one hand and a carrier bag of stale crusts in the other. Eleven floors of concrete that smelt of bleach and somebody's tea. On each landing he stopped to breathe and counted the doors, the way his mum had taught him to count pews.

Keep reading

Shona's balcony on the eleventh was the only green thing for a quarter mile. Two roses stood in a blue plastic tub, their heads bowed as if they were listening for something below. Since her gran had gone into the home on Ashworth Road, nobody had watered them but the weather, and the weather had been mostly spit, the kind that never reached the soil under the eaves.

The outside tap on the walkway had been capped by the housing association in March, so he filled the can from the caretaker's cupboard instead, rinsing it twice first in case the bucket water had gone sour. He poured slowly, the way you would for a sleeping baby. Water gathered on the rims of the petals and hung there, each drop catching the orange light from the car park so that every rose seemed to be holding a few small lamps.

When he came back down, the lights were coming on across the estate, one window at a time, and he could see the balcony from the stairwell window, the two dark heads still dripping. He didn't think about the lift again until Friday, when the engineer finally came, and by then the roses had opened another inch.