Colour tattoo of pink roses, purple flowers and black lace and mandala patterns running down the side of the torso and onto the hip, with teal brushstroke accents.

Rose and lace floral side piece

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large floral tattoo covers the side of the torso and hip, dominated by realistic pink roses and purple blooms. Black lace-like and mandala-style patterns with stippled dotwork fill the gaps between the flowers. Teal brushstroke streaks run vertically through the design, and the shading is soft and blended across the petals.

Realism Botanical Blackwork Ribs Thigh Rose Flower Lace Mandala Peony Brushstroke Dotwork Leaves

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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

Mind the step, love, the floor's been wet since the morning. You'll want the good chair by the window while I finish the bobbins, because my hands are not what they were and the light goes early in February. My mother taught me the Honiton patterns at this very table, and she had a rule that a lace-maker never draws her own lines in pencil. You pin, you twist, you trust the pins. Pink roses were for the sitting room wallpaper, she said, and lace was for the bones of a thing, the part no one sees.

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Then Walter came back from the Somme with a sack of seed packets and a plan to grow roses up the whole south wall of the cottage. Nobody believed the bushes would take in our clay, but they did, and by the second summer the blooms were the size of a child's fist and the colour of the inside of a shell. Mother said they were showing off. She cut them for the church and kept the teal glass bottles on the sill, the ones that caught the rain, and she let the purple clematis take the fence without a word of complaint.

I sewed the last pattern the week before she died, a mandala of dots and loops, stitch by stitch, because she had asked to see one more finished in her lifetime. I pinned it to the wall beside the window. The roses are still climbing outside, and every July I stand in the garden with a pair of scissors and cut one for the sill, and I leave the lace untouched, the pins still standing in it, because she always said the best work is the work that stays a little unfinished.