Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and trailing vines across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral shoulder and upper arm tattoo

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wears a black and grey tattoo of roses, leaves, buds and trailing stems that runs over the shoulder and down the outer upper arm. The linework is fine and the shading is light, with the flowers rendered in detail and the foliage sketched more loosely. The tattoo is shown against pale skin, with the subject's maroon floral dress in the background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Leaves Vine Bud Stem

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 carrier had wrapped the cutting in wet sacking and tied it to his saddle, and by the time he reached Hollin Wall the thing had put out three pale roots and two buds no bigger than barleycorns. Mrs Achterberg, who kept the walled garden then, turned the sacking back with a thumb and said the rose had no business being alive. Roses did not travel. They sulked in carts and gave up in ditches, and everybody in the valley knew it.

Keep reading

She planted it against the south face of the wall anyway, where the stone held the day's heat until nearly midnight. It was an old dark variety, the kind the monks at Aldbeck used to grow for the altar, and it had little patience for being moved. For two summers it did nothing but sulk. In the third it caught hold, and the stems came up the brick, found the iron of the gate, wound round the top bar, and began to hang down the lane side in long loose strands, budding as they went, so that passers-by had to duck under them to reach the road.

The carrier's boy came back the following autumn for the money he was owed. He stood in the lane with his cap in his hands and looked up at the gate, where the rose had dropped a sleeve of leaves and blooms almost to his shoulder. Why did she never cut it back, he asked. It was in the road. Mrs Achterberg was at the far end of the wall with her secateurs, and she did not turn round. Every bud that falls off the wall, she said, is a rose that got where it was going. Then she held out his wages, and he took them and ducked under the branches.