A red rose with a green stem and leaves, surrounded by pink, blue and black watercolour splashes, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Red rose with watercolour splashes on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A realistically shaded red rose with a green stem and leaves sits at the centre of the design, with thorns along the stem. Loose pink, blue and black watercolour-style washes and sharp black slashes surround the flower and break across the composition. The colours are bold and saturated against pale skin, and the photograph is taken from behind, showing only the upper back and hair.

Botanical Realism Back Rose Stem Leaves Thorn Watercolour splash Abstract shape

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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 and mind the candle, because the snow has the shutters and this part is about a rose that refused to freeze. Up at Harrowgate Pass there was an inn called the Grey Hen, and its landlady, Ada Pell, kept one glasshouse behind the stables where nothing grew in January except her red rose, which she talked to the way other women talk to their husbands.

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On the night of the great drift a stranger came up the track dragging a sledge, and on it lay a chapel window the wind had torn from St Brannoc's. Pink glass, blue glass, black leading snapped like kindling. He wanted a bed and a bowl of broth for the window, and Ada, who had never once been able to refuse a broken thing, said yes. He would not say where he had found it. He only asked whether she had a rose, and she laughed and said she had the only one in the valley.

They laid the shards on the kitchen table and fitted them around the rose she carried in from the glasshouse, its stem wrapped in wet sacking. Every thorn pricked her thumb. The stranger hummed a hymn none of the guests knew, and the wind went round the inn like a dog looking for a way in. By dawn the rose stood inside the frame, red at the centre, with the pinks and blues and black slashes of the old glass breaking away around it like weather.

When the sun came over the ridge it poured through the window and laid pink and blue across the snow, and the stranger was gone, his sledge gone, the bed unslept in. Ada kept the window and the rose. The thorns are still on the stem, if you care to look, and I have never once seen her cut them.