Black and grey botanical forearm tattoo with a rose, quartz crystals, sprigs of foliage and fine dotted geometric lines.

Crystals and rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo showing a large rose at the centre, with a cluster of quartz crystals above it and sprigs of small flowers and feathery foliage curving up the arm. The linework is bold and outlined, with hatching and stippled dotwork shading on the petals, crystal facets and leaves. Fine dotted lines and a small circle frame the lower rose bud and leaf, giving the composition a geometric structure. The design is entirely black ink in greys and black.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Forearm Rose Crystal Flower Sprig Foliage Leaf Rosebud Dotted line Circle

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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 rain had been coming off the canal since six, and by noon the stallholders on Cutler's Row had given up pretending it would stop. I kept my pitch under the blue tarpaulin anyway. Mr Okafor from the bakery next door brought me tea in a chipped mug and said my rosebud was the only thing on the row that looked like it had been planted on purpose.

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I had been selling pressed flowers and bits of cloudy quartz for eleven years, and I knew what people wanted: something small to hold in the pocket. Nobody wanted a whole rose, but a woman in a green mac stopped at the crate of geodes and asked whether the crystals were real or just stones that had decided to behave. I told her they were real, grown slowly in the dark under some hill in Brazil, and that the trick was patience. She bought three, wrapped them in newspaper, and walked off towards the station with her shoulders hunched against the weather.

At closing, the rain eased to a fine grey drizzle that hung in the lamplight. I packed the dried sprigs of yarrow into a tin, lined the crystals up in their tray, and took the last rosebud from the dish. It was a real one, dried so long it had turned the colour of old paper, with a dotted circle drawn around it in ink by a girl who had come in last spring wanting the same thing on her arm. I left it on the counter for her. Outside, the canal was flat and black, and for once the water was holding still.