Full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder in realistic colour, showing a red rose, daisies, pansies, a hummingbird and a blue butterfly.

Colourful floral sleeve with rose and butterfly

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve of flowers covers the upper arm and reaches onto the shoulder, with a large red rose at the centre and white daisies around its base. Pansies, a pink hibiscus and a yellow bloom sit above, with a blue butterfly and a hummingbird drinking from a flower near the top. The shading is smooth and painterly, with soft washes of pink, green and blue behind the flowers, and colour ink dominates the composition.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Daisy Pansy Hibiscus Hummingbird Butterfly 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 rose had to be the wrong red, and Nell knew it before the printer did. Hal leaned over the proof on the kitchen table, flour on his cuffs from the bread he'd been baking since five, and tapped the centre of the bloom with a floury thumb. 'Looks like a fire engine,' he said. 'Your grandmother's roses were never that loud.'

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She didn't answer. She was thinking about the daisies, which had been easy, and the hummingbird, which had not. Nobody on the Shropshire side of the hill had ever seen one. The seed merchant wanted it anyway, a bird drinking from a hibiscus, because the catalogue had sold a thousand packets of hibiscus seed the year before on the strength of a picture like that. So she had painted it from a postcard, from a library folio with cracked spine, and from a memory of a boy who had come home from Trinidad with a bird skin in a biscuit tin.

On the Thursday the courier brought a parcel from Cornwall. Inside was the original sketch, returned, with a note in red biro: Too pretty to be true. Keep it honest. She looked at the bird for a long time. Then she thinned the green with water, let the wash run down under the petals where the light would have to fall, and kept going until the thing on the page looked less like a postcard and more like something that had flown in through an open window and decided to stay.