Colour neo-trad tattoo on a forearm of a large red rose shaped like a circus big top, with a ferris wheel, a tightrope walker, a small animal on a ball and a unicycle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circus rose with big top and unicycle on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large, realistically shaded red rose fills the centre of the design, with its petals striped red and white like a circus big top. Behind it sit a ferris wheel, a tightrope walker, a small animal balancing on a ball and a unicycle, all in bright, saturated colour on a teal backdrop. The tattoo is shown close up on a forearm against a dark leather background.

Neo-trad Realism Forearm Rose Animal Ball

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

Shift along the awning, the lot of you, and mind the puddle by the eel van, because the rain has been coming down on Harrow Street since dawn and shows no sign of minding anyone. You want the story of the rose? Then sit where I can see your faces. My grandmother sold roses from this very pitch, back when the big top stood on the common where the car park is now, and the circus folk bought their buttonholes from her every Saturday.

Keep reading

There was a girl among them called Ilse Marrow who rode the unicycle round the ring with a red rose held in her teeth. Every night she dropped it at the foot of the wire, and every night the man up there caught it without looking down, because he had never once in three seasons looked down. The little grey monkey on its painted ball watched the pair of them with the patience of a bank clerk. Nobody thought much of it until the wire snapped in the October wet and the man came down into the sawdust with his arms flung wide.

He lived. He lived because Ilse had kept hold of the rose the whole time, and when she reached him the petals were bruised dark where her fingers had gripped them. My grandmother said she never sold a rose after that without thinking of the wet ring in the sawdust and the big striped tent going up behind it like a bruise healing. She painted the bloom on her stall's board, red and white, and beside it she painted one yellow boot, the one he had been wearing when he fell.

Mind the step now. The roses are three pounds, and the rain, as you can see, is free.