Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses across the hip and lower stomach, beside a navel piercing and ripped denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses on the hip

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two large roses sit side by side on the hip and lower stomach, with a third bloom partly visible at the edge of the skin. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading on the petals and smooth tonal blending in the centres. The warm skin tone and light blue denim surround the tattoo, and the composition is cropped close to the body.

Botanical Other Rose Flower 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 cuttings went into the hold wrapped in wet sacking, forty of them, tied with my mother's green wool. Nobody aboard the Harriet Lowe believed a rose could survive nine weeks of salt and dark, least of all Pruett the mate, who called them my funeral wreaths and kept his tobacco tin balanced on the crate lids. Each morning I went down with the lantern and scraped a fingernail along the stems to see whether the green still lay under the bark.

Keep reading

By the Cape they had gone the colour of pencil lead. The old damask ones were worst, their petals furled tight and grey at the edges like tissue held too near a candle. I told the captain they were finished. I told myself the same, and then I went on talking to them anyway, because a man who has nothing else to talk to will talk to a box of sticks.

Off the Tasmanian coast, in the middle of a watch when the sea was flat as a slate, one of the sticks opened. It was no bigger than a thumbnail, pale as ash, with shadow pooling in the folds of each petal. Pruett came down with the lamp, looked for a long while, and said it looked like something drawn in the margin of a prayer book by a boy who had been told to stop. He did not laugh.

We reached Hobart in late autumn with eleven of the forty still alive. I planted them at the back of a rented yard where the rain came sideways off the river, and the first bloom that spring was the grey of smoke held in a closed hand. I wrote to my mother that the wool had done its job, and that I had kept my word about the roses.