Black and grey engraved-style rose with leaves and stem tattooed on a forearm, shown against a white top and denim shorts.

Engraved rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose in bloom, with a stem and several leaves, is tattooed across the outer forearm. The petals are built up with dense hatching and fine stippled lines, giving an engraved, woodcut-like effect. The tattoo is in black ink on a plain skin tone, set against a blurred green background, with the top half of the wearer's body out of frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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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

Mrs Hosken kept a single rose in the back parlour of Gull Cottage, the boarding house at the end of Pendower Steps, and she would not let it be cut. It came up each June through a crack in the flags, a big close bloom with its petals folded like the lines of an old copper engraving, and it had been there longer than anyone who lodged in the house. The fishermen said it grew over the grave of a woman who had walked into the bay one winter with her pockets full of stones. Nobody had planted it. Nobody had the heart to pull it.

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The summer Daniel Vosper came to lodge, he was ten years old and had nothing to do but watch the tide. He saw the rose and asked why its leaves had no colour, only lines, and Mrs Hosken said the ink had run out of the world a long time ago. He sat with his pencil and copied the bloom on the back of a tide table, shading every petal with tight, patient strokes until his fingers ached. Each evening he showed her the drawing, and each evening she shook her head and told him to draw it again, darker.

On the last night of August the wind dropped and the bay lay flat as a plate. Daniel went out to the flags with a knife, meaning to cut one bloom for his mother, and found the earth under it soft and dark. Beneath the root lay a pewter locket, green with age, and inside it a curl of paper bearing a name he could not read because the sea had got into it. He carried the locket back to the parlour. Mrs Hosken took it, closed her hand over it, and said only, "Now she can go out with the tide." In the morning the rose was gone, and on the step lay one perfect leaf, shaded in fine black lines, as if someone had drawn it for him.