Realistic pink rose with black sketched flowers and watercolour splashes across an upper arm and shoulder tattoo.

Realistic rose and sketched flowers on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on the upper arm shows a shaded, realistic pink and red rose at the bottom, with dark outlined leaves beneath it. Above, black linework sketches of a rose and a poppy-like flower with hatched leaves sit on the shoulder. Soft purple and red watercolour splashes run behind the design and down the arm, and the colour ink is dominant.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Flower Leaves Watercolour splash Poppy Sketch

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 dyer's daughter of Harrowmere had hands stained to the wrist, and the king's steward came to the works in the first frost to say the crown wanted a red that would not fade. Nobody in the valley had managed it. Madder ran brown by spring, and the cochineal that came up the river in sealed casks cost more than the mill.

Keep reading

She went up the hill instead, to the abbot's old garden where roses had gone wild over the wall. Poppies grew among them, opening for one morning and dropping their petals on the path like spilt wine. She gathered the fallen petals in a linen cloth, boiled them with alum and a handful of river clay, and watched the water turn from grey to a colour the steward had no word for. Pink first, then the deep red of a rose's heart, then violet at the edges where the cloth met the air.

The king wore the cloth at midwinter. The courtiers said it looked as though someone had bled into snow, and the queen asked where such a thing could be bought. The dyer's daughter named her price: the garden wall, so the roses could spread down the lanes and the poppies could seed where children played. The king laughed, then signed.

By the next summer the lanes ran red and purple, and the old wall was gone. When people asked how she had kept the colour from fading, she shrugged and pointed at the hedges. Nothing needed to stay in a pot for long, she said, if the ground remembered it.