Colour tattoo of a pixel-art pink rose with green leaves on the side of a torso, above the waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pixelated rose on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pink rose with red shading and green leaves is rendered as large square pixels, giving it a retro video game look. The blocks are flat, with lighter pink highlights and darker red shadows, and the leaves are drawn in several shades of green. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the torso, with a dark top at the upper edge and a teal waistband at the bottom.

Botanical Ribs Rose Leaves Pixel art Flower

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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 sprite sheet came to Ruth in a shoebox, forty-one index cards in her brother's handwriting, each one a grid of squares coloured in biro. Dev had died in March with his council flat still full of consoles. She was meant to be sorting the cartridges for the charity shop on Hyde Road, but she kept getting stuck on card twenty-two, which had a rose on it.

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It was sixteen blocks wide. Three pinks for the petals, the lightest one catching the top left corner the way the lamp used to catch the glass of the cabinet in the Piccadilly arcade where they spent their Saturdays feeding ten pences into a game about a knight who rescued nobody. Dev had drawn the leaves in four greens, and along the bottom edge, where a stem should have been, he had left one square of teal, like a mistake he couldn't bring himself to fix.

She rang the number on the back of the box. A man in Stockport who repaired Spectrum boards answered on the fifth ring and said he had never seen a rose in any game he'd played. "Not many flowers in those days," he said. "Mostly things that wanted hitting." Ruth laughed, then didn't, then asked him to read the grid back to her square by square, so she could hear her brother's pattern in a stranger's voice.

She copied it onto graph paper that night and took it to a parlour on Oxford Road the following week. The artist asked whether she wanted it big or small. Big, she said. She wanted every block to be its own small decision, the way Dev had made them, one square at a time, until something soft rose out of all that hard edge.