Traditional style colour tattoo of a red-nailed hand above two red roses, gold wheat stalks and red berries, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand, roses and wheat on an arm

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A red-nailed hand reaches towards a cluster of two red roses, gold wheat stalks and small red berries. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid red, green and gold fills and some soft red shading on the petals. A dark green and red scalloped motif fills the top right corner, and the design sits against plain skin on a dark background.

Traditional Other Hand Rose Wheat Berry Leaves

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 harvest came in thin that year, and my aunt Ilia counted the sacks twice before she let me near the threshing floor. Our field lay under the hill where the road bends towards the harbour, and every stalk had to be accounted for, because the tax men came up with their wax tablets and short tempers. I was twelve and resented being trusted with nothing but the broom.

Keep reading

On the third morning a woman came up the track with a basket on her hip. She wore a dress the colour of old brick, and her nails were painted red, which I had never seen on a farm woman before. She did not ask for grain. She held her hand out over the wall, palm down, the way you might settle a horse, and Ilia, who feared nobody, put a sheaf of wheat into it without a word. The woman laid two roses from her basket against the gold stalks, then a sprig of red berries, and walked off down the hill towards the sea.

Ilia stood there a long time. Then she said the roses were for the dead and the wheat was for the living, and that the stranger had only asked for the living's share of the bread. I did not understand her then. I carried the flowers to the shrine at the crossroads, and the berries stained my fingers for a week in a red I could not scrub away. When the tax men came, the sacks were full. Nobody thought to count the last one.