Close up of a pink rose with green leaves and a bud tattooed in colour along the ribs and side of the torso, with a hand resting across the chest.

Pink rose and leaves on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pink rose with shaded petals sits on the side of the ribs, with a smaller rose bud and dark green leaves trailing up and down the torso. The petals use soft red and pink shading, while the leaves are built from layered greens with fine veining and dark outlines. The subject is framed diagonally across the midsection, with a blurred red background and a hand resting across the chest.

Botanical Neo-trad Ribs Rose Rose bud Leaves Flower Botanical

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 bell for Terce has stopped by the time you reach the wall, and the old damask rose is already leaning over the infirmary path as if it has been waiting for you. Brother Anselm left a note tucked under the shears in the potting shed: cut the suckers from the stock, leave the grafted bloom, and do not let Brother Fergus catch you lingering by the south bed. You read it twice. The ink has run where the damp got into the paper.

Keep reading

The suckers come away easily, pale green and bitter-smelling. Beneath them the leaves are the dark green of holly after rain, each one veined like a map of a river nobody has bothered to name. You work along the wall until the shadow of the chapel roof has crept over your boots. Near the root you find a rose bud, pink at its edge and shy at its heart, growing from the wrong place, and you hold the knife above it longer than the Rule allows.

Anselm's ledger in the shed records the planting: fourteen bushes in the year the east range burned, cuttings brought up on a cart from a nursery in the valley. Beside that entry, in pencil and a different hand, someone has drawn a single rose with a small arrow pointing at the root. You recognise the slope of the letters. It is the hand that wrote the note in your pocket.

You leave the bud. When Fergus comes down the path at None, he sees the shears on the bench and the cut suckers heaped in the barrow, and he says nothing at all. Later, in the refectory, you find a petal caught in the fold of your sleeve, pressed flat and pink, and you slide it between the pages of the ledger where the arrow points.