Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing a dove with spread wings above a veiled woman with downcast eyes and a rose below.

Dove, veiled woman and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dove with spread wings sits at the top of the design, set against soft clouds and radiating light rays. Below it, a veiled woman with downcast eyes is shaded in smooth greys, with a pale rose at the bottom of the composition. The piece is entirely black and grey, using soft gradients and fine outlines on the wings and the veil.

Realism Forearm Dove Rose 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

The dove came aboard the morning after we lost sight of the Lizard, and Mr Pardoe swore it was a bad sign, though he swore at most things before breakfast. It settled on the foremast crosstree with its feathers puffed against the drizzle, and for three days nobody could shift it.

Keep reading

We lay becalmed in a sea the colour of pewter. Above us the clouds stacked up grey and soft as carded wool, and at noon the sun broke through in long pale spokes that lay across the water until the hull seemed to stand in light. Cook scattered biscuit crumbs on the deck and the dove came down for them with its head tilted, watching us the way a widow watches a churchyard gate. Nobody said it aloud, but we all thought of Ellen Varley, who had stood on the quay at Penzance in her black veil and never once looked back at the ship as it cast off.

On the third night the steward found a rose pressed flat inside the logbook, pale as a moth's wing. Nobody owned to putting it there. Pardoe said it had come from the Bible on the chart table, and that was the end of his grumbling, or the start of something worse. At first light the wind came, sudden and cold from the west, and the canvas filled with a crack like a musket.

The dove lifted off the crosstree without a sound and climbed through the rays toward the one gap in the cloud. We hauled on the braces and let it go. I still have the rose. It sits in my own logbook now, between the pages for the Cape, and I have never written anything beside it.