Colour realism tattoo of a peach rose with a green bud and leaves, surrounded by teal and purple watercolour-style splashes, on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peach rose with watercolour splashes on torso

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A peach and orange rose in open bloom sits at the centre, with a green bud and leaves curling out to the right. The petals are shaded smoothly from pale cream to deep amber, with fine highlights along the edges. Loose teal, purple and pink washes fade out around the rose, and the photo is taken at a slight angle with black clothing at the bottom left.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Rose bud Leaves Petal Splash

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

Mind the third step, it gives under a boot the same as it gave under my father's. Sit where the wind can't reach you and I'll tell it straight, though the sea will tell it differently if you ask her. The rose by the lamp-room door was never the Keeper's doing. He kept his oil measured and his logbook square, and he had no patience for anything that didn't earn its salt. It was Ada who put it in, the spring she came out from Penzance with a paper bag of cuttings and a face like wet slate.

Keep reading

She told the Keeper it would be dead by August. It wasn't. Something in the salt air deepened the peach of it, so that by midsummer the petals had gone from cream at the rims to amber at the heart, and the bud beside them swelled green as a sea bottle. Ada would stand on the gallery at dusk with her hands tucked in her apron and watch the rose take the last of the light, and she'd say the sea was only ever trying to copy it.

Then came the October gale, the one they still call the Long Night. The lamp went dark at ten because a wave had cracked the glass, and Ada went out in her oilskins with a tin of matches and a lantern she'd never lit before. Spray came over the rail in purple sheets. When the Keeper found her at dawn she was sitting at the foot of the tower, soaked through, the lantern still warm in her lap, and every petal of that rose had been torn loose and flung seaward in a fan of pink and teal.

The lamp was relit by noon. Nobody replanted the bush. But the following spring a single peach bloom pushed up through the gravel at the foot of the wall, and the Keeper, who never once lied to me, swore it was the only thing on this rock that ever came back without being asked.