Black and grey full sleeve tattoo of shaded roses, leaves and mandala ornament covering the upper arm and forearm of a smiling woman in a grey vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and mandala full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A smiling woman in a grey tank top shows a full sleeve tattoo on one arm, with her face cropped at the nose. The design combines shaded roses and leaves with a mandala, a spiral motif and geometric panels, drawn with fine detail and soft grey shading. The arm is set against a patterned black and white wallpaper, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Realism Botanical Geometric Upper arm Forearm Rose Leaves Mandala Spiral Geometric pattern Ornament Sleeve

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

Nell had been tracing the same rose for three days when Dennis came up the stairs with the tea and told her the works would shut at Christmas. She didn't look up. The rose was the hard part. Its petals had to turn back on themselves so the eye read them as shadow rather than ink, and the leaves had to repeat across the roll without the seam ever showing.

Keep reading

She weighted the sheet with four brass sparrows from her father's desk and ran a thumb along the spiral beneath the blooms. Her mother called it the snail shell, because it grew from the centre of every design the Garsides had printed since 1951. Her father had cut that curl into the first lino block himself, and nobody else in the building could draw it freehand. Nell had measured it four times that week with dividers, and still it came out a fraction too loose.

Below the roses sat the panels: a stack of geometric lozenges, each a little smaller than the last, climbing toward a point. Dennis said nobody bought that sort of thing any more, that the shops wanted plain stripes and grey woodchip. Nell said the shops had said that before, and then they had bought the roses anyway. The roses had gone up in hallways from Halifax to Harrogate, curling round doorframes where people never noticed them.

On Friday she inked the last sheet. The spiral came out true on the first pass, which she took as a sign of something, though she wasn't sure what. She rolled the proof, tied it with string, and pinned the offcut above the kettle where the steam would curl its corners. Dennis could close the works. The snail shell would still be on the wall.