Realistic colour tattoo of a red rose with shaded green and blue leaves on the top of a foot.

Realistic red rose on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A large, realistic red rose in full bloom covers much of the top of a foot, with petals shaded from deep crimson to bright pink and white highlights along the petal edges. Soft dark blue and grey shading behind the bloom suggests leaves and depth, with a smaller shaded leaf near the toes. The photograph is taken straight on, with the toes visible at the bottom of the frame against a dark background.

Realism Other Rose Flower Leaves

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly spent and I will not shout a tale like a fishmonger calling his prices. You want the rose that grew against the wall in Ostia? Then hear it from the dirt up, because every good story begins in the mud where somebody has been careless.

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Teuta kept that bush the way other women keep a cat or a grudge. Every spring it put out one bud, tight and dark as a clot of wine, and every spring it sulked for a fortnight before it opened. Her son Marcus owed money on the quay to a man called Crispus, who kept his debts in a waxed ledger and his temper in a leather purse. When Crispus came up the lane that April, he did not ask for the money. He stood under the wall and admired the bloom, the way a man admires a horse he means to buy cheaply.

He wanted it cut for his mistress's supper table. Teuta said the rose opened only for hands that watered it without asking anything back. Crispus laughed, took his knife to the stem, and carried the bloom off in his fist. By dusk the petals had gone the colour of old bruises and dropped onto the road, and the stalk in his hand had turned black as a burnt wick.

Next morning Crispus came back up the lane. The bud beside the wall had opened in the night, deep crimson with a rim of pale light along every petal, and it was the only thing in Ostia that smelled of morning. He held out the ledger. Teuta took it, turned to the page with his name, and tore it cleanly down the spine. Then she handed it back, and he, for once, had nothing to say.