Black and grey botanical tattoo of an open five-petalled flower with dotwork centre and leaves on the inner forearm, with the hand clenched below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open flower and lace tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single open flower, similar to a wild rose, sits on the forearm with a small bud and seed head above it and leaves curling to the left. The linework is dark and fine, with the flower's centre built from stippled dots and a lace-like pattern of smaller dots and curves beneath the bloom. The tattoo is black and grey against a plain, soft beige background, and the photograph is composed with the arm and clenched fist centred.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Flower Rose Bud Leaves Dot Lace 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 rose had found the crack in the landing again, the one under the lamp room door where the lime mortar had given up in the frost. Nell knelt on the wet granite with her father's pruning hook across her knees and counted the buds. Five open, one sulking green, and a seed head already gone to rust on the stem above. Below the window the sea kept up its patient argument with the rocks, and the lamp hummed the way it always did, a note just under hearing.

Keep reading

Her father had planted it the spring her mother left, though he never said so. Nell had only worked it out from the dates pencilled on the back pages of the logbook. He had carried a sprig up from the cliff path in a jam jar, set it in a bucket of gravel, and told her roses were stubborn things that only needed to be left alone. She had not believed him. Thirty years of salt wind had proved him half right. The stems were thin as wire, and the leaves curled inward whenever a gale came, but the flowers kept opening, pale and flat-faced, their centres dusted with a fine lace of stamens, as if someone had tried to count the stars with a pin.

She snipped the dead seed head and left the green bud alone. The relief boat was late, and the light was already tilting toward evening when she saw its wake turning the point, a white stitch on the grey water. Nell carried the one open bloom inside and set it in the jam jar on the sill, where the lamp would catch the petals when it turned.

The boat came in under the cliff with its horn blowing. From the rail, the crew would see the light sweep out over the bay, and somewhere in the glare, a single pale flower on the sill that nobody had asked her to keep.