Botanical tattoo of pink roses, rosebuds, green leaves and orange sprigs on a woman's upper arm, below the shoulder.

Pink rose spray on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of pink roses and closed rosebuds with green leaves, plus thin orange-brown sprigs curving up and down the design. The shading is soft and painterly, with smooth blended tones on the petals and leaves and fine detail on the stems. The spray sits diagonally across the upper arm against a plain pale background, and the white lace top is visible at the left of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Rosebud Flower Leaves Foliage Sprig

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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 last cutting had gone brown at the tip by the time Wren carried the tray down to the lower galleries, and she stood under the grow-lamps for a long minute deciding which to save: the cutting, or the book it had been copied from.

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The book was a botanical codex from before the flood years, with a hand-coloured plate of a rose spray so soft it looked breathed on. The painter had built the petals in layers, pink over rose over the faintest blush, and let the leaves go glossy at their edges. Along the stems ran thin orange-brown sprigs that the index called only "catkin, unidentified." Nobody on the ring had grown anything like it in eleven years of trying.

She took the tray to bench six, where the air smelled of wet soil and copper, and worked a bud from the dying cutting onto stock her grandmother had kept alive in a jar of recycled water. Her fingers were steady. Her eyes were not. Halfway through, the stock threw a shoot she had not planted, and on it hung a cluster of seed-heads, russet and fine as sand, exactly where the painter had placed them.

She did not write it down. She tied the graft with thread, sealed the jar, and carried it to the window where the valley lights had come back on below. By morning the bud had opened, pale pink over deeper rose, and she sat beside it with the codex on her knee, matching the orange sprigs to the living ones one by one.