Woman in a peach sleeveless blouse with a lace collar, showing colour tattoos of roses and a bird on her upper arms and forearms.

Colour roses and bird tattoos on both arms

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The photo is cropped from the lips down and shows a woman in a peach sleeveless button-up blouse with a lace collar and a satin bow at the waist. Both arms are covered in colour tattoos, including red roses with green foliage on the left upper arm and forearm, and a grey-toned bird and script lettering on the right. The shading is soft and the composition is centred on the torso, with the tattoos framing the sides of the image.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Forearm Rose Leaves Bird Script Cloud

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 been reading the same letter since Madeira. The third week out, a grey bird starts following the ship again, and Hollis, the bosun, says shearwaters don't come this far south unless they've lost their way or their nerve. He says it looking at you.

Keep reading

The letter came aboard at Tilbury in a bread bag, tied with wool, its corners softened by somebody's thumb. Your sister writes that the roses under the kitchen window have finally opened, the red ones your father planted the spring before he died, and she has pressed one between the pages so you'll know what she means. The petal has gone the colour of weak tea now. You keep it in the back of the logbook, behind the cloud charts, and every night you lift the cover to check it's still there, as if the sea might come in through the binding.

Off the Horn the squall comes down at four bells, a dark wall that swallows the horizon whole. Everybody runs. You stay at the rail a moment longer, because the bird flies straight into the wind without wasting a single beat, and you find yourself counting its wingbeats the way you once counted the stairs to your father's room. Then the rain hits, the bird is gone, and the deck is sluiced white.

When the sky clears off Valparaíso, you write back on the reverse of a chart, in pencil, because ink runs in salt air. You tell her the roses aren't the only thing that comes back. You tell her you watched a bird hold its course through a gale, and that you mean to hold yours. The letter goes ashore with the pilot's boat, and the grey bird wheels once above the mainmast and turns for home.