Close-up of a black and grey realism rose tattoo on a woman's forearm, with a silver ring with a turquoise stone on her raised hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman's raised hand and forearm against a dark background, with a large black and grey rose tattoo wrapping from the wrist up the forearm. The roses are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail in the petals, and a second bloom is partly visible below the first. Her hair and a patterned dress sleeve frame the shot, and the only colour comes from a turquoise stone in a silver ring.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Ring Hair Dress

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the lamps don't reach the back of the tent and I'll not raise my voice for the cheap seats. You want the rose story? Then hush the man who keeps coughing. Old Hadley Stroud ran the shies on the Michaelmas circuit for forty years, and he kept a rose in a tin under his cart. Not a real one. A drawing, black and grey, shaded so soft you'd swear the petals were damp.

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He won it off a sign-painter in Stamford in the wet autumn of nineteen twelve, in a card game he should never have sat down for. The painter had lost his wife to a fever and his nerve to the drink, and he staked the one thing he had left worth anything: a design for a rose that only bloomed in the dark. Hadley laughed, took the tin, and kept it.

That season a girl from the hop farms came to the shies after the lamps were doused, when the crowds had gone home and the wind got under the canvas. She asked him to show her the rose. He never did. He said a rose in a tin was only paper, and paper doesn't open for anybody who asks nicely.

Then the frost came early and the farm was sold. Hadley packed his cart in the black small hours at the Lewes ground, and when he finally lifted the lid, the petals had unfurled across the waxed paper, every shadow deeper than before, and a second bloom was waiting underneath. He never told a soul which of them had got the better of the bargain. Mind your lamps on the way out.