Traditional style tattoo of grey roses with black outlines and orange and green leaves, sitting on the forearm near the elbow.

Grey traditional roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several roses in full bloom and bud, with one large open rose at the centre and smaller blooms toward the top left. The linework is bold and black, and the petals are filled with flat grey shading and light highlights. Olive green and orange accents on the leaves and a few thorns add colour against the grey, and the design wraps around the forearm toward the elbow.

Traditional Forearm Rose Rose bud Leaf Petal Thorn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gramophone in the Palais had been wheezing the same foxtrot since eight, and Marjorie had stopped counting the times Dennis walked past the bandstand without looking up. She had sewn the grey silk rose onto her good blouse that morning, the one with the cuff that had frayed, and pinned a bud beside it where the seam showed. Nobody in Wigan made grey roses. Her mother said they looked like something left out in the rain.

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At the interval she carried two lemonades to the balcony rail and watched the floor below turn slowly under the mirror ball. Dennis came up the stairs two at a time, his hair slicked flat, a crease down his trousers sharp enough to cut bread. He stopped on the landing and stared at her sleeve as if it had said something rude to him.

"Those are for the Harrison girl," he said. "Everyone knows she's been asking."

"Then she can ask me herself," Marjorie said, and handed him one of the lemonades. The thorns she had stitched in dark green along her forearm caught the light when she lifted her glass. Below them the band struck up again, and Dennis, who had never once in four years asked her to dance, held out his hand before the first chord finished.