Black and grey shaded roses with leaves tattooed across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two large roses with leaves cover the shoulder and upper arm, shown from the front of the shoulder down the outer arm. The petals are outlined in bold black linework and shaded in soft grey gradients to give them depth. The white top at the lower left and the plain skin around the tattoo keep the focus on the roses.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaves Flower

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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

Mind the coil of rope, love, and sit where the wind can't get at you. I'll tell it the way my nan told it to me, with the kettle going and the boats still out past the Mare's Tail.

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Up on the sea wall at Skerrow there were two rose bushes that never got on. Ada Crane planted them the spring her Walter went out on the Fortune and didn't come back in with her. Everybody said a rose won't take in salt wind, and Ada said that was exactly why she'd picked it. Stubborn things, she said, like the men who drink in the Anchor on a Tuesday and never say what they mean.

Every morning she walked the wall with a bucket of rainwater and a pair of shears her husband had ground sharp. The first bush bloomed black in the frost, petals so dark they looked inked, and the gulls wouldn't land on it. The second came up pale as fog off the bay, grey at the rims where the light caught it, and it leaned the same way the Fortune used to lean when she turned for home.

The winter the Bessie Ann went down off the Pins, four lads came ashore with nothing but their oilskins. Ada went down to meet the lifeboat with her shears still in her apron. She cut one bloom from each bush and pressed them into the hands of the lads' mothers, one black, one grey, and told them to keep the petals dry. Come spring the roots had found each other under the wall. Nobody planted a third bush, and nobody has ever been able to say which of the two came first. Walk the wall at first light and you'll see the pair of them leaning out over the water, looking for a boat that's late.