Three mirror photos of a full arm sleeve of pink neo-traditional roses with green leaves, covering the shoulder, upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink rose sleeve on an arm

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a sleeve of large pink roses in various stages of bloom, with scattered petals and green leaves filling the gaps between them. Bold dark outlines define the petals and leaves, with soft pink shading and highlights giving the flowers volume. The three photos show the arm from the front, side and back, with the sleeve running from the shoulder down to the wrist against a plain background.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Rose Leaves Rose bud

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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

You are up a ladder at four in the morning with a tin of madder lake and a brush that has lost half its bristles, because the garland on the big top's centre pole has gone the colour of weak tea. The Hippodrome opens in Spalding on Saturday whether or not anyone is left to watch. Mr Pellow, who painted every rose on that canvas back in 1952, is in the hospital in Boston with a hip, and he has left you a sheet of instructions in pencil that stop halfway down the page.

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The roses are the only thing the company never sold. Every other wagon has gone to a scrapyard in Peterborough: the calliope, the painted howdah, the tiger cage with its brass latch. The garland stayed, a ring of blooms in every stage, tight buds at the bottom and full open faces at the top, with green leaves that Pellow edged in black so they look cut from tin. The madder is nearly gone, so you mix the pink with a spoon of beetroot, and you lay the first petal and then the second until your forearm is freckled with it.

Dennis, the ringmaster, comes to watch at dawn with two mugs of tea and says nothing about the price of paint. Then the flap lifts in the wind and a single real petal, brown and brittle from some old bouquet, drifts down past you onto the sawdust.

On Saturday the tent holds eleven people and a dog. A girl in a yellow anorak tips her head back from the front row and counts the roses on the centre pole. You know the number, because you painted every one. She reaches twenty-six, loses her place, and starts again.