Neo-trad style forearm tattoo of a grey shaded rose and buds above two red roses, with grey leaves, on the outer forearm.

Red and grey roses on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey and black rose with fine engraved linework and stippled shading sits at the top of the design, with two small buds and grey leaves. Two larger red roses sit lower on the forearm, with smooth, bold colour and dark shading in their centres. The composition runs diagonally up the forearm against a plain white top and dark background.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Rose Bud Leaf 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 old white rose came out of the wall at Hollin Cottage the spring after the fire, all thorn and no flower, and my father would not let me dig it up. Thirty years later it was still the only thing on the orchard that bore a hip in August, when the apples had gone to wasps and the lane smelt of windfalls. I took its buds with a sharp knife that week, the way he taught me, and slid each one under the bark of a rootstock in the nursery rows.

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Mrs Ferrier at the end of the lane had a red rose she called Madame Ysolde, bought from a catalogue in 1952 and never once pruned properly. She wanted it moved before the new people came with their digger. I budded her cuttings onto the same stock so the two would grow side by side, and told her the old rose would sulk for a season. She laughed and said roses had always sulked. Her bud took on the third day. The grey one took too, though to my eye it had been waiting to be asked.

In September I walked the rows with a flask of tea and tested each graft with my thumb, the way you check a bruise. Where the bark had knitted, a pale line ran round the stem like a healed seam, and the bud beneath had gone green and firm. I wrote the names on wooden tags in pencil, because ink runs in rain. Mrs Ferrier's went in the front row.

I left the last hip of the old rose on the bush for the blackbirds. When I walked back up the lane, the red ones at the wall had already dropped their petals onto the gravel, and the grey one stood above them, still holding its shape.