Black and grey engraved tattoo of a rose with thorny stem and a hand holding a rose bud, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and hand engraving on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose bloom sits near the top of the arm, with a thorned stem running down and a hand gripping the stem beneath a bud and leaves. The linework is fine and dense, built from hatching and cross-hatching that gives the rose and hand a woodcut or engraving look. The tattoo is rendered only in black and grey on pale skin, set against a plain white shirt and a light background.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Hand Thorn Stem Leaves Bud

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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

Sit yourself down on that bench, love, the one with the iron legs, and mind the draught from the footbridge. I'll tell you about the rose, since you've been looking at the wall clock as if it owes you money. Old Hennessy at Carrow Junction used to say every station has one story that never gets off the platform, and this is ours.

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It was the spring of 1911 when Nell Garside came down from the Hollins farm with a bunch of briar roses for her brother, who was shipping out to Halifax on the eastbound. He never came back for them. Instead a surveyor called Owen Pryce, all elbows and borrowed coat, stepped off the Manchester train, saw her standing with a bloom in her fist, and asked the price. She said the price was his name. He gave it. She handed him the rose, and the thorn went straight through the heel of her palm, and she never once let go of the stem while he fumbled for his handkerchief.

They were courting by June. The rose went into the tin in the signal box where Nell's father kept his tea, and the tin got a second rose, and then a third. By autumn Owen was writing letters on company paper, saying the line to the coast would be finished by Christmas, and that when it was he'd build her a house facing the sea with a garden of nothing but briars.

Then the notice came that the surveyors were withdrawn. He took the last train out on a Tuesday. Nell stood on the platform with her hand closed round a stem she'd cut that morning, and the petals came loose in the wet while the guard blew his whistle.

She kept the stalk, dried and pressed flat in the timetable for 1912. That timetable's still in the booking office drawer, if the new lad hasn't burned it for kindling. Go and look, if you like. Mind the step.