Colour realism tattoo of two pink roses, a rosebud and green leaves across a shoulder, with soft watercolour-style wash behind the flowers.

Pink roses and bud on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two pink roses, one open and one partly turned, with a small closed bud and several green leaves. The petals are shaded with smooth gradients and fine highlights, giving a soft, lifelike finish. Pale pink and purple washes spread around the flowers and fade into the skin, and the composition sits across the shoulder and upper back.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower

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 old queen of Harrowmere had asked for a rose that would not fade, and so the gardeners spent three summers failing at it. Every bloom they cut was browning at the edges by supper. Mistress Wren, who kept the walled garden below the castle, said the trouble was that they had bred for looks, and roses bred for looks forget how to keep.

Keep reading

Her grandson Ash came up the hill one wet morning with a cutting wrapped in sacking. He had found it against a boundary wall in the reed marsh, two full blooms and a closed bud on one stem. The petals were the pink of a shell at the rim and deepened to plum where the rain had soaked into them, and the leaves were the green of pond water in shade. He would not say whose wall it had been, only that nobody had tended it for years.

The queen took one look at the washes of colour bleeding into the stem and said the thing was dying. Wren said nothing. She grafted the cutting onto an old briar that very afternoon, and by midsummer the larger bloom stood open on the queen's sill in a silver cup, holding its colour through the heat and the long dusk without a single brown edge. The queen never asked where it came from again.

When the frosts came, Ash went back down to the marsh and found the wall with the bud still standing in the stones, closed tight and ready. He left it where it was, and the next spring it had opened into a bloom of its own.