Colour tattoo of two blue and purple roses with black leaves on a forearm, in a botanical style.

Blue and purple roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two large roses in shades of blue, violet and pink sit on the forearm, with their petals rendered in soft blended shading. Black leaves with fine engraved-style lines frame the flowers and spread down the arm. The colour fades to teal and pink washes behind the roses, giving a vivid, layered composition.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower 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 carry the bucket up the back lane before the hooter, because the water from the old sump is the only thing in Hollin that will take the colour you want. The allotments sit between the colliery wall and the chapel, and nobody tends them now that the cage has stopped turning. Your father's rows are still there under the nettles, and the roses he grew in the seventies are only thorns now, grey and bent like old wire.

Keep reading

The bushes that came up blue the spring after the flood were not in any catalogue. Mr Ainsley from the Institute swore they were a cross with a dye plant, and the judges at the autumn show turned them away with a shrug. You kept cutting them anyway, wrapping the stems in wet newspaper and carrying them home under your coat. By October you had three heads that opened the colour of a bruise going off, violet at the heart, teal bleeding out at the edges where the frost had touched them.

On the last shift before the shaft was capped, the men came up the lane in their boots, black to the elbow, and stopped at the gate because they had never seen anything in Hollin that was not grey. You cut the best bloom and gave it to Danny Rourke, who had worked the cage beside your father for twenty years. He turned it over in his hands, then pinned it to the brass of his lamp.

That evening he went down with it lit, and the men said afterwards the lamp showed a blue no one had seen underground before. You walked back up the lane with the empty bucket, and the water in it had gone a faint violet, as if the sump had decided to keep something of its own.