Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, buds and trailing vines across a woman's shoulder and upper arm, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wears a dark dress with a red floral print, and her shoulder and upper arm are covered by a tattoo of roses, buds and trailing stems. The roses are shaded in black and grey with fine, engraved-looking linework and soft tonal gradients. The image is a warm, softly lit close crop that centres the tattoo across the shoulder and down the arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Bud Vine Leaves

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

You have ruled the last of the hairlines on the copper plate by lamplight, and Mr Hollis is already calling up the stairs that the Arbuthnot order must leave on the early cart. The seed catalogue wants forty roses by Monday, each one engraved from the living bloom your father grew in the glasshouse behind the works, and you have cut every one of them except the last, which will not sit right in its wreath of stems.

Keep reading

You take the loupe and the burnisher and go down to the cold room. The bloom on the bench is a cabbage rose gone soft at the edges, its petals curled back like the lace on a christening gown. You turn it to the window and see what the copper has been missing: the shadow where the petals fold over each other is not black at all but the grey of wet slate, and it has to be built up by a hundred fine strokes, lighter at the rim and heavier at the heart.

Your sister Edie comes in with a wedding dress over her arm, because the seamstress has sent word that the bride wants the hem worked with the same roses as the plate. Edie holds the gown against the window and the flowers catch the light, and you realise the pattern was copied from your engraving in Hollis's careful pencil. Your rose has become a veil, a hem, a bride walking up the aisle at St Paul's with nobody looking at the stems.

You finish the plate at dawn. The last rose sits on the copper with its stem curling toward the margin, and when you pull the first proof it comes off the press grey and clean, the shading rising out of the paper like weather. Hollis holds it to the lamp and says nothing for a long time. Then he says, "Well, that is a rose that will outlast the marriage," and you laugh, and you are not sure he is joking.