Black and grey dotwork and hatched forearm tattoo of a rose above a face, on a person holding a cigarette with their legs crossed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and face forearm tattoo

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows a rose above a face drawn with fine hatched and cross-hatched lines, with a row of dots running down towards the wrist. The ink is solid black and grey with no colour. The arm is held across the lap, with a hand holding a cigarette, white trainers and a healing scar on the thigh visible in the frame.

Dotwork Forearm Rose Face Cigarette Hand Scar Leg

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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

Mrs Tennant let the back attic to me on condition that I kept the gas meter fed and my burins out of the washing up bowl. Forty-one years of engraving for the Hallam almanac had stiffened my fingers, and the sea air at Saltcote was supposed to help. It didn't help the ink. Every morning the salt came through the sash and the plates clouded before I could bite them.

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The face arrived in a crate of old copper in March. It was a stranger's face, a man with a heavy brow, drawn by someone who had hatched every line by hand, crossing and recrossing until the cheeks looked like weathered timber. Above the brow a rose had been cut so finely its petals seemed to lean toward the light. Along the bottom margin someone had stippled a row of dots, tiny pits that ran off the edge like footprints walking away.

I spent a week trying to print it. On the eighth night I stopped trying and sat with the lamp angled low, tracing the dots with my thumbnail. Mrs Tennant knocked at midnight to say the tide was out and the boys from the pier were singing under the window. I told her to shut the door. When I looked again the face had softened in the lamplight, as if the plate had been waiting for someone to stop insisting on a clean proof.

I pulled a proof at dawn, rough and smudged, and pinned it to the sash where the salt couldn't reach. Hallam's will want the clean copy. They can have it. This one is the impression I meant to make all along.