Colour realism tattoo on an upper arm with a red line-drawn rose, a purple and blue-eyed face, a pair of hands and a teal geometric band near the elbow.

Rose and face on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's face with blue eyes, purple eyeshadow and lips is shown in shaded realism, held by a pair of hands with dark nails rendered in stippled shading. A red linework rose with leaves sits to the left, and a teal triangular lattice band wraps around the arm below the design. The image is shown three times side by side, with a teal background and soft black surround.

Realism Botanical Geometric Upper arm Rose Face Woman Eye Lip Hand Leaves Lattice Triangle

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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 rose came in on the last train from Leeds, tucked into a carrier bag under seat fourteen, and by the time I'd logged it nobody had come asking after it. Red stems, paper petals gone soft at the edges, a card tied on with cotton thread. I open the lost property hatch at Carrow Cross on Tuesdays, so I'm the one who reads the cards.

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The card said only: Ask Mrs Adair to keep the envelope. She'll know what to do with the hands. Inside was a photograph of a woman in heavy purple shadow, looking sideways as if someone had just called her name from the next room. I walked it up to the footbridge, where the teal paint on the ironwork has been lifting for a decade, and found Mrs Adair at the top step, scattering crumbs for the pigeons in her good coat.

She didn't take the envelope. She looked at the rose for a long time, then at the lattice of the railings, and said her husband had proposed to her in the waiting room below with a flower he'd lifted from the cemetery gates. 'Put it back where it was found,' she said. 'Somebody always comes back for things.'

So on Thursday I laid it on seat fourteen again, card still tied, photograph tucked under the stem. By the morning train the rose had gone, and in its place someone had left a single ticket folded into a triangle, the fold bleeding teal where the paint on the bench had worn through.