Black and grey fine line tattoo of two outline roses with cursive script across a woman's shoulder and upper chest.

Outline roses and script on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's shoulder and upper chest showing two outlined roses, one above the other, with a line of cursive script running towards the collarbone. The linework is fine and even, with no shading inside the petals, so the flowers read as open outlines on the skin. The composition is cropped below the chin and above the waist, with a strapless floral top and a bedroom setting softly blurred in the background.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Rose Script Cursive Quote Outline Flower

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

By the fortieth day out of Gravesend the last of the green things had gone over the side with the cabbage water, and you were the only one aboard who still missed them. The mate catches you at the rail with a stub of carpenter's pencil and tells you to get back to the brightwork. You do not, not yet, because the sea is the colour of wet slate and there is nothing else to look at.

Keep reading

So you draw roses. Not the cabbage roses printed on the pantry tins, but the wild ones from the hedge behind your mother's house in Kent, two of them, one tucked above the other as if they are leaning in to hear a secret. You have no ink and no paint, so you leave them as bare outlines, petal inside petal, and let the grey of the paper stand in for shade.

The cook sees them first. He says nothing, only pins the sheet inside the chart-room door where the second mate will catch it at the change of watch. By the Cape the page is curling at the corners, salt-dried and smudged, and the mate has started to hum whenever he passes it.

When the Hope finally noses into Port Melbourne, the captain tears the page from its nail, folds it into his coat and presses a shilling into your palm. He remarks that a bit of paper had caused a good deal of trouble. You tell him roses don't need much, only room for the sky to show through them.