Forearm with a painterly botanical tattoo of pink roses and green leaves, beside an open watercolour paint palette and brush on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Painterly roses tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A raised hand and forearm show a large floral tattoo of pink roses, buds and green foliage that runs from the wrist towards the elbow. The petals and leaves are shaded in soft, loose washes that resemble watercolour painting. Beside the arm sits an open watercolour palette with a paintbrush, on a plain white surface.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Leaf Bouquet Paintbrush

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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 sports hall still smells of floor polish and squash, and the trestle table by the door is stacked with name badges written in marker that has faded to grey. You scan for your own name, then for Gwen Pritchard's, because Gwen unlocked the art cupboard every Thursday after the bell and let whoever stayed late mix colours in the lid of her old tin palette until the cakes of pigment cracked and went soft.

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You find her by the urn, smaller than you remember and wearing a cardigan the colour of weak tea. She doesn't say hello. She says, "You left this," and holds out a flat brush with its handle wrapped in masking tape, the bristles still shaped to a point. You were fourteen and furious about a sky that wouldn't come right, and you threw it into the rinse jar. She must have fished it out and dried it on the radiator, and kept it in a drawer for the better part of thirty years.

"I thought you'd want it back," she says. "The roses you did on the cupboard door are still there, you know. Nobody ever managed to scrub them off."

You take the brush. Later, when the hall has emptied of people who wanted to talk about mortgages and loft conversions, you sit on a plastic chair and wet the bristles in a paper cup. You work a little rose madder into a puddle on the back of the attendance list and paint one loose petal, then another, until the sheet looks like the corner of a garden. Across the room Gwen watches over her glasses, and for the first time all evening you don't feel the need to explain yourself.