Black outline tattoo of three roses and a leaf across a shoulder, with no shading or colour added.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outlined roses on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three overlapping roses with a single leaf below them, drawn as unshaded black outline on pale skin. The linework is even and continuous, with petal folds described by inner contour lines. The design fills the top of the shoulder and sweeps down towards the upper arm, with a grey top visible at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Rose Leaf 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

The rain has been coming sideways across the market since six, and the tarpaulin over Mrs Okafor's stall has begun to sag in the middle, filling with water like a pocket. You hold a bucket under the drip and keep your eye on the sketchbook balanced on your knee. Three roses, you have decided, with a single leaf beneath them, because one rose looks like an apology and three looks like a promise.

Keep reading

Mrs Okafor is not interested in promises. She wants the line unbroken, she says, so the water has nowhere to get in. You try to explain that a line is only a decision about where an edge falls. She tells you to draw the edge then, and to stop talking, because the cash box is getting wet. You draw the back rose first, half hidden, its folds marked by short inner curves, then the two in front overlapping it, never lifting the pen from the paper.

By noon the rain has thinned to a fine grey mist, and customers come in under the awning shaking their coats. A boy buys one stem of white roses for his grandmother. You watch him go and notice that the flowers in the buckets have already blown open, bruised at the edges and dropping petals onto the cobbles. The drawing on your page looks nothing like them, and that is exactly why it is better.

When the stall closes you tear the sheet out, fold it into quarters and slide it inside your jacket. The paper is damp but the ink has held. Mrs Okafor watches you from under the tarpaulin. 'Keep it dry,' she says, and for once you think she means it kindly. Tomorrow it will rain again, and you will bring the book back, and the roses will be waiting exactly where you left them.