Bold black traditional rose with leaves and a bud on the forearm, with part of another tattoo visible near the top of the arm.

Black traditional rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits on the outer forearm, with a open bloom at the centre, a smaller bud to the upper left and leaves and a stem spreading around it. The outlines are thick and the petals are filled with solid black ink, with bare skin left as bright highlight bands. The plain white top and brick wall behind keep the focus on the tattoo.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Bud Leaves Stem 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

The north wall of the infirmary garden at Saint Ebba's had been bare for nine winters, so when Brother Tobias found a bud the size of a thumbnail pushing through the mortar at its foot, he ran to fetch the abbot without his trowel, and was scolded for it later.

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The bush was a grafted briar that nobody had planted on purpose. Its canes stayed dark with rain, and its petals opened in layers like a fist uncurling, each edge rimmed with pale where the lamplight caught it. Old Brother Wenceslas swore it was the rose the first brothers had carried from Normandy in a sealed jar, and that it would bloom only for someone it had decided to keep.

Abbot Crispin lay under two blankets in the infirmary, his breath rattling like a loose shutter. He asked me to cut the bloom and set it on the sill where he could see it. I told him the stem was thorned like a bramble and I'd likely bleed on the altar linen. He said thorns were only honest about what they guarded.

I cut it at dusk with the shears I keep for hedges. The petals were heavier than they looked and dark as a wet slate roof. In the morning the sill was empty and the window stood open, and the bush had put out two more buds, one of them already split along its seam.