Forearm tattoo of red and grey roses, rosebuds and leaves in a botanical style, shown on a person wearing a knitted cardigan.

Rose and bud sleeve on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with two large open roses, a smaller rose and several rosebuds on a branching stem, with leaves filling the gaps. Bold black outlines define the petals and foliage, with soft grey shading inside the leaves and a dusty red wash across the flowers. The composition runs diagonally from the wrist up towards the elbow, and the person is pictured in a cream knitted cardigan against a dark background.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Rose Rosebud Flower Leaves Stem Branch

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

Nobody on Cold Harbour remembered who had carried the first rose up from the lowland gardens, but everybody knew the rule that came with it. The rose belonged to whoever kept the glasshouse, and it was never cut. When a bud formed, the keeper had to leave it three nights before it opened, so that it could hear the wind on the glass and decide for itself.

Keep reading

Ilse Tarrow kept the glasshouse the winter her brother walked out past the ice wall with the ferry dogs and did not come back. She was twelve. The people of the reach came to her with their questions, as they always did, because a rose that had opened was thought to know things. A widow asked whether her son was alive. A boy asked whether the sea would come back. Ilse fed the roots with warm water and told them the rose was busy.

In the spring a stranger came up the switchback road with a cart and a sick mule. He was a seed-trader from the far side, and he wanted one cutting, nothing more, in exchange for a sealed box of wheat. Ilse said no. He sat in the glasshouse for a week, and on the seventh night the rose opened all at once, two great red heads and a smaller one beside them, and he wept without knowing why.

Ilse gave him the cutting in the morning. She had worked it out in the dark. A rose that bloomed for a stranger was a rose that had been listening, and a thing that listens cannot be owned. The trader carried it south wrapped in wet sacking, and the story goes that somewhere below the ice a garden grew from it, with a door in the wall left open for anyone who came to ask.