Woman in a black sheer top and grey shorts showing a rose, owl and script tattoo on her right upper arm and forearm, with a small coloured tattoo on her left forearm.

Rose and script tattoos on a woman's arms

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a black sheer short-sleeved top and grey turn-up shorts shows tattoos on both arms, with her face cropped out of frame. The right upper arm and forearm carry a rose, an owl and flowers with script above, in black and grey linework and shading. The left forearm has a smaller tattoo with warm red and brown tones, and the plain grey studio background keeps the focus on the arms.

Upper arm Forearm Rose Owl Flower Script Leaves

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cold that comes up through the deck plates. Nobody tells this one right, so I'll tell it the way my gran told it to me, with the lamps half down the way they were that winter. The Orchard Ship Tamsin carried nine hundred sleepers out past the Kessler gate, and among the grain and the seed vaults there was a bay of roses that nobody had any business keeping. Old Mother Ashdown kept them. She also kept the owls, six of them, bred to clear the mice from the hydroponic racks.

Keep reading

The owls were all named for ship-stations, but the favourite was a barn owl called Mercy, who had a face like a pressed plate and a habit of sitting on the rose trellis to watch the water pipes. One night the fault came through the power spine and the bay went black for a full watch. Ashdown went up the ventilation shaft with a shuttered lamp and her bad knee, calling the bird by name, and got nothing back but the groan of the hull and the cold pressing on the grilles.

She found her at last in the rose bay, which had gone still and grey with frost. Mercy was perched on the top cane, wings folded tight, and beneath her, curled in the thorns, a single bloom had stayed open against every rule of the ship. Ashdown wrapped the bird in her coat and carried her down, and the roses, every one of them, flushed red again by the time the lamps came back.

The script above the bay door was painted by a boy who later went down to the seed vaults and never came up. It says KEEP THE LAMP LIT in careful letters, and Ashdown used to tap it with her knuckle on the way in. Every dawn after, the rose opened before the lamps came up, and she swore on her gran's grave that it was the owl who told it to.