Colour traditional tattoo of red roses, orange and blue flowers and green leaves rising from a patterned vase on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flowers in a vase on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo on the forearm shows a vase filled with red roses, orange and blue flowers and green leaves. The vase has a decorative band of geometric pattern at its base. Bold black outlines and solid fills in red, orange, blue and green sit against bare skin, with part of a dark tattoo visible above near the elbow.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Daisy Pattern

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 vase rides on the passenger seat because nothing else in the truck is steady enough to hold it. You have wedged it between a folded blanket and the jerry can, and every time the tyres drop into a washout the roses lean and right themselves, red heads bobbing as if they are arguing with the road.

Keep reading

Forty kilometres out from Corran Well the fuel gauge gives up its pretence. You coast onto the gravel shoulder beside a dead windmill and sit with the engine ticking. The radiator has been hissing since the last ridge. The jerry can is half full, and the only question left is which thirst gets it. The roses are curling at their edges already, orange petals gone brittle as old paper.

The vase was your grandmother's. Its foot is painted with a band of teeth and diamonds that looks, to you, like it is keeping time. You unscrew the can, hesitate, then tip a cupful into the vase instead of the engine. The stems drink. By the time the sun touches the mesa the blooms have straightened, and a small blue flower you had written off has opened all the way.

You walk the last stretch with the vase cradled against your hip, water slopping at the rim. When the lights of the Hennessey station finally show, the woman at the counter takes one look at you and the flowers and asks which you want filled first. You tell her the flowers. They have earned it.