Woman in a black racerback vest with a white slogan, showing colourful traditional-style tattoos on her upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful arm tattoos with slogan vest

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with dark hair wears a black racerback vest printed with white block lettering that reads 'This is who I am, you don't have to like it'. Her left arm, on the left of the frame, is covered with bold, dark-outlined tattoos in red, green and blue, with a rose-like motif near the elbow. The face is cropped out and the composition is a mid-body shot against a plain white background.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Rose

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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

Mr Pike wanted the rose gone before the Saturday dance, so he sent word through Dot at the cloakroom that the red thing on my arm was bad for trade. I told Dot to tell him the rose had paid for itself, the same as I had, out of my own wages, and that if the Starlite wanted a girl with clean skin it could hire one off the chapel steps.

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The rose was done in a back room above a chip shop in Margate by a man called Sid, who worked with one needle and a jar of ink that smelled of pennies. Green for the stem, blue for the shadow under the petals, black outlines so heavy you could read them from across the ballroom. My mother looked at it once and said nothing for a week, which was her way of saying the worst.

On the Saturday I wore a black vest that Dot's sister had lettered for me in white paint: THIS IS WHO I AM, and under it, YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT. Ronnie from the docks read it twice, laughed, and asked me to dance anyway. He said the rose was the best thing in the hall. I said he was the only one who had looked at it properly.

When the band slowed down, Mr Pike stood by the doors with his hands behind his back, counting heads the way he counted the takings. I let my arm rest on Ronnie's shoulder, red and green under the glitter ball, and I watched Pike work out that he had nothing to say that wouldn't sound like a man who had lost an argument with a rose.