Traditional style floral tattoo on a forearm, with red roses, a large grey dahlia and white blossoms outlined in black.

Red roses and grey florals on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm is covered in a dense band of flowers, including two red roses, a large grey dahlia-like bloom with dotted shading, and white blossoms with orange centres. Bold black outlines and solid fills define the petals and leaves, with dotted shading in the central flower. The design wraps around the arm against a dark top and a patterned skirt.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Dahlia Flower Blossom Leaves Floral

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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 officer at the Dover desk wants to know what is wrapped in the Sunday supplement, and you tell him it is only your aunt's roses, which is almost the truth. Underneath the newsprint are three rooted cuttings and a dahlia tuber the size of a fist, packed in moss that still smells of rain from the Ardennes. He lifts the bundle with two fingers, the way you might lift a dead moth from a windowsill.

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Marguerite kept the bed beside her back door for forty years. The grey dahlia she called the cabbage bloom, because it looked like something a sensible woman would boil for supper. The white anemones opened every April with orange eyes like struck matches, and the two red roses bled colour into the path each August whatever the weather. When she went into the hospice in Namur she made you promise, and you promised with the easy confidence of a niece who had never killed a plant on purpose.

He asks for the paperwork. You hand over the letter from the nursery in Liège, its stamp slightly blurred, and he reads every line while the queue shuffles behind you and somebody's child starts to cry. Then he turns the dahlia over in his palm, the dirt crumbling onto the tray, and his face changes. His mother, he says, grew the same grey heads along a fence in Kent, and she called them the cabbage bloom too.

He folds the newspaper back over the bundle carefully, the way you would fold a letter you intend to keep, and gives it back. Plant them in the north corner, he says, where the frost sits longest. Then he waves you through without stamping anything. You walk out into the car park with the bundle tucked under your arm, already deciding where the sun will fall in the morning.