Colour tattoo of pink roses with green leaves and a rosebud across the shoulder and upper arm of a person in a red top.

Pink roses and foliage on an upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cluster of pink roses, including a full bloom and a smaller bud, sits with green leaves and fine stems across the shoulder and upper arm. The petals are rendered with soft shading and blended pinks, and the leaves use layered greens. The composition wraps diagonally over the shoulder against plain skin, with a studio background visible behind.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Rose Rosebud Leaves Foliage Flower Stem

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

You find the bloom in the wet grass behind the big wheel, where the lights have gone out one by one and the generator is coughing itself quiet. It is the fullest of the three roses Mrs Pell gave you this morning, wrapped in a page of the local paper and pressed into your hand at the gate of the Co-op car park. She said they would last a week in water. She said a lot of things that month.

Keep reading

Dessie has painted the gondola doors every spring since the fair came up from Kent, and every autumn the paint comes off in the rain. He keeps the old tins in the back of the lorry, labelled in pencil with the year. You find him there with a brush in one hand and a rag in the other, touching up a rose that has lost its middle petals. 'They never hold,' he says, without turning round. 'Pinks always go first.'

You hold the jar up to the single bulb over the lorry steps. The full bloom has opened further since morning, its outer petals curling back as if they have been waiting for permission. Beside it the bud you nearly threw away has split along one seam, a sliver of colour no wider than a fingernail.

Dessie finally looks. He takes the jar, turns it slowly, and says nothing for a long time. Then he hands you the brush and tells you to paint the bud first, because it is the part that needs the most patience, and the part that will still be there when the rest has gone.