Neo-traditional red rose tattoo with green and yellow leaves and bold black outlines, shown on a bent elbow.

Red rose tattoo on an elbow

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A large red rose sits on the outer elbow, with a second rose bloom behind it and several leaves in green and yellow-orange. Thick black outlines define the petals and leaves, and the red is shaded with darker tones to give the bloom depth. The arm is bent and angled diagonally across the frame, with a tiled floor and a door edge visible in the background.

Neo-trad Other Rose Leaves Flower

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

Don't you look at me like that, love, I'm coming to the roses. Everybody wants the roses. Ada Venn had the only bush in Little Sallow that flowered red in the hard frost of fifty-three, and she gave the cutting to nobody, not the vicar, not the widow at the mill, and certainly not Tom Carrow, who had asked her twice.

Keep reading

So Tom did what a man does when he's been refused. He went to the school railings at dusk with a spade and a jam jar, dug up the scrawny white climber by the bike shed, and carried it home under his coat like a stolen cat. Ada saw him from her front window. She came down in her wellingtons and stood at his gate with her arms folded, and she told him the frost had put the red into her bush and the red would never take in a white stock, not in a hundred years. Tom said he would wait.

He waited the whole of that winter, watering the thing with the washing-up water, and in June it came out the colour of a pillar box, the leaves gone green and gold at the edges, with a second bloom tucked behind the first like someone leaning in to listen. Ada came round to see it. She didn't say a word. She pressed her palm flat against the brick wall beside the gate and held it there, and when she lifted her hand there was a red print on the mortar, a rose petal pressed into the stone. The paint never came off, and that wall is still standing if you care to look.