Traditional style tattoo of two red roses with green leaves and a scroll banner reading MOM and DAD, on the upper arm.

Red roses and banner with MOM and DAD

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two red roses with green leaves sit on the skin, with a scroll banner across the lower left that reads MOM above DAD. The roses have bold black outlines and solid red fills with darker shading in the petals. The composition is tightly grouped, with the banner curling around the base of the flowers against a plain skin background.

Traditional Upper arm Rose Leaves Banner Scroll Mom Dad Lettering

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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

Cyril Hanley had painted shop fascias on Mill Lane for fourteen years before he let anyone else hold his good sable brush. Sheila Dunn was the first, the summer his hands began to shake, and she was hopeless at the start, flooding every scroll with too much red so the letters bled into the grain. He made her repaint an offcut of ply each evening until she could bring a curl of ribbon round a corner without lifting the brush.

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The commission came in August from a woman who ran the glasshouses out past the railway bridge. She wanted two roses on the side of her delivery van, deep red with black outlines, and a ribbon beneath them reading MUM above DAD, for the couple who had planted the first cuttings there in 1931. Cyril let Sheila do the petals. She worked the shading dark at the base of each bloom, the way he had taught her, and when the paint was dry she stood on the cobbles with her thumbs hooked in her apron and said the roses looked as if they were holding their breath.

The van went up the lane on the Friday, its doors catching the low sun. Cyril watched it until the hedge swallowed it, then went back inside and found Sheila's offcut pinned above the bench. In one bottom corner, where the ribbon folded under, she had painted a small S, so faint you would only notice it if you already knew where to look.