A hand rests on a sleeping husky while a colour forearm sleeve shows roses and a bird in a traditional-style design.

Hand on a sleeping husky beside a forearm tattoo

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hand rests on the head of a sleeping husky with white and red-brown fur, its eyes closed and its nose in bright sunlight. The forearm shows a sleeve of tattoos with bold outlines and flat shading, including roses and what appears to be a bird. Teal, yellow, pink and orange ink dominate against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Dog Hand Rose Bird Floral Sleeve

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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

The dog had taken to sleeping on the afterdeck where the sun pooled, and Mr Pell swore it was the only warm thing left on the Edith Rose that March. Ned Harrow sat on a coil of hawser beside her, sleeve pushed to the elbow, picking tar from his cuff with his thumbnail. Ice ground along the hull like a slow argument nobody wanted to finish.

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The rose on his forearm had been inked in a back room in Wapping for a shilling a letter, bold black outlines and petals of pink and yellow that had faded to something like marmalade. Above it sat a swallow in teal, the one thing he'd asked for that the artist had argued down to a smaller size. Sable had come aboard at Upernavik as a pup, all teeth and opinions, and had grown into a dog who believed the whole ship existed for her comfort.

On the ninth day the captain ordered a cut through the floe, and the dog, bored of being stepped over, wandered off the ice edge onto a drift that groaned under her weight. Ned went after her with a boathook and his heart in his mouth. He found her a hundred yards out, curled in a shaft of low sun against a hummock, asleep as though the ice had been built as a hearth for her alone.

He knelt and laid his hand on her head, the rose and swallow bright against the white glare, and waited with her while the wind kept its distance. When the leads finally opened and the men hauled him back over the gunwale, Sable shook herself, sneezed on Mr Pell's good boots, and trotted straight back to the sun. The swallow had never once carried him anywhere, but Ned figured he'd earned a bit of warmth himself, and he sat down beside her to take it.