Black and white photo of a tattooed person in a floral sleeve on the upper arm and forearm, with a portrait-style tattoo across the stomach.

Floral sleeve and torso tattoos in black and grey

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of two people embracing, with the focus on tattoos covering one arm and the abdomen of the woman in a black lace bra and briefs. The arm sleeve shows roses and other florals in fine shading, and the stomach carries a large portrait-style design with a flowing, feathered background and a scripted word. The soft grey tones and natural light give the image a studio feel, with the faces cropped out of frame.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Other Rose Floral Sleeve Portrait Abdomen Couple Hand Script

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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

Sit down, love, and stop turning that cup round like it owes you money. The roses come first. My mother grafted the first bush against the south wall at Hollins End in the spring of 1961, when the whole valley was grey with coal smoke, and she swore the blooms would only ever come up silver and black because the light off the chapel stone was wrong for colour. She argued with the bees about it, too. She was a stubborn woman, and I am her daughter.

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Her ledger is still in the bureau drawer, the green one with the cracked spine. Every cutting is pencilled in with a little shaded sketch beside it, rose after rose, leaves hatched so fine you need the lamp to see them. Between the pages she kept jay feathers, blue bars and all, pressed so long they've gone the colour of weak tea. Further on there's a portrait she drew of a woman's face, eyes half closed, with petals drifting off her hair like ash off a bonfire.

You asked what the word was on the inside cover. Go on, read it out. Keep. That was my father's hand, not hers, and he wrote it the week before the wall came down in the big gale, when people said the whole place would go into the sea. It didn't. Nothing went that year except his temper and the last of the colour.

Give me the lamp. There, under the grey rose, see where the pencil tore the paper? Nineteen sixty-one, the spring she planted it. I thought that tear was a mistake for thirty years. It isn't. She pressed a thorn through the date so that somebody would stop and ask.