Realistic pink and blue-green roses with grey-green leaves, shaded in colour on the calf of a leg, with a bathtub in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink and blue roses on a leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two large roses, one in pink and red and one in blue-green, with grey-green leaves set behind them on a dark shaded background. The petals are rendered with soft gradients, highlights and fine shading to give a three-dimensional, realistic look. The roses fill most of the frame, with the leg running diagonally and a foot and white bath edge visible at the left.

Realism Botanical Calf Rose Leaf Flower Petal

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 roses have to be cut before the tide turns, or the salt has them by afternoon. You kneel on the wet flags below the lamp house with the secateurs your father left on the windowsill, and you tell yourself the pink bush matters most, because he planted it for your mother the spring after the Mary Ellen went down on the Skerry rocks.

Keep reading

The blue one is the trouble. It came from a nursery in Penzance as a grafted cutting that was meant to be a lilac and came up the colour of a bruise going off. It only blooms properly after rain, so every year the keepers argue about it over tea. Its leaves are grey-green and hard as tin, and they curl behind the petals the way hands cup a match. You cut three stems and find a bee asleep in the heart of the biggest bloom, and you leave it there.

By dusk the wind has backed round to the west, and the lamp must be wound every two hours until the relief boat comes. You climb the hundred and twelve steps with the roses tucked inside your coat, and at the top you set them in the brass cup beside the lens, where the gulls cannot reach. When the beam turns it strikes the pink first, and the petals flare the red of a warning flag. Then the blue catches the sweep and goes the colour of the sea at its deepest, and out past the Skerry a small boat, which has been waiting for exactly this, turns for home.