Three views of a realistic colour full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing red roses, chains and a jumping spider.

Red roses, chain and jumping spider full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve shows large red roses near the shoulder, with dark chain links running down the arm and a close-up jumping spider with large eyes at the wrist end. The shading is smooth and photorealistic, with deep reds, oranges and greys blending into a dark, smoky background. The photo shows the arm from the front, side and back against a black backdrop, with the subject's face out of frame.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Rose Chain Spider Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the hollow beyond Carrow, where the keep had lost its roof to a hundred winters, roses grew up through the broken hall as though someone had planted them to hide something. Old Mags Teller said the last lord had chained his daughter to the gatehouse with links as thick as a man's wrist, and that the roses were her doing, because she had asked the earth for something that could bloom through iron.

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Nobody believed Mags, but the children did, and so did the spider. It was a small brown thing with four great black eyes set across the front of its face, the kind that leaps rather than spins, and it lived in the gatehouse among the rust. Each spring it climbed the chain link by link, testing every one, and each autumn it came down with a fly in its jaws. The village boys dared each other to touch it. Tom Sallow did, and it sprang onto his knuckle and looked at him with all its eyes at once, and he ran home without his cap.

When the lord's nephew came back with men and a cart to strip the chain for scrap, the spider was already on the gate. It leapt from link to link, across the spokes of the cart wheel, onto the foreman's hand, who swore and dropped the bolt cutters in the nettles. By dusk the chain still hung, and the men had gone looking for a quieter job.

That evening Mags stood at the gate with her palm flat against the cold iron and felt something give under the rust. A rose had pushed another bud through the chain, red as a coal in grey ash. "There," she said to nobody in particular. "Told you."