Colour botanical tattoo of red roses, white and lilac wildflowers and green leaves across a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Red roses and wildflowers across upper arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The design shows two large red roses on the upper arm, with a cluster of white and lilac wildflowers and a small bird near the elbow, all set among green leaves. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading that gives the petals and leaves depth. Colour is limited to reds, greens, lilac and white, and the design wraps up from the arm onto the shoulder against a dark background.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Flower Wildflower Leaves Bird

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

You have been up since four, cutting sweet peas for the Saturday stall outside the Corn Exchange in Thrale Market, and Mr Pardoe from the bank has already grumbled about the smell of wet stems. The roses are the difficult part. Your father's old damask bush by the privy wall has dropped its first flush early, and you carry the best heads in a bucket of rainwater, two of them as big as a fist, crimson deepening to pink at the rims.

Keep reading

The wildflowers come from the verge on the Kettering road, picked before the council men arrive with their scythes: campion, stitchwort like scattered sixpences, a clutch of meadow cranesbill gone the colour of a bruise. Mrs Ashdown offers you a shilling for the lot for her daughter's wedding. You say no. The goldfinch that has nested all spring in the hawthorn at the lane's end is still feeding its young there, and you have promised yourself you will leave that branch alone.

Walter Hale is waiting by the church railings when you get there, his kit bag already packed for the morning train to Catterick. He says he does not want flowers, but he takes the bunch anyway and holds it like a hymn book. You tell him the roses are for his mother, who has not come out of the house since the telegram. He tells you the finch was in the hawthorn again this morning, singing as if nothing had happened, and you realise he has been watching the same bush you have.

You unwrap the last of the twine and hand him the cranesbill. Nothing else in Thrale grows the way that does, he says. You tell him to bring it back in one piece. Behind you the bucket tips, and a small bird drops onto the rim to drink, unafraid, as though it had always belonged to the stall.