Woman seen from behind in a backless lace dress, with traditional-style red roses and a skull tattooed on her upper arm and forearm, holding a white bouquet on a beach.

Rose and skull arm tattoos at a beach wedding

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman stands with her back to the camera in a fitted, backless white lace dress on a sandy beach, holding a white bouquet. Her left arm carries a traditional-style tattoo of red roses on the upper arm, with a grey skull and further shaded linework extending down the forearm. The warm, soft natural light and white tones of the dress and flowers keep the focus on the tattoos against the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Back Rose Skull Dagger Bouquet Lace Beach

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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

You learn the lace trade the way your mother taught you, by counting threads until your eyes ache. In Hollen Bay, the summer the herring boats came back thin, the only steady work was the bobbin frame in the back room above Pruitt's chandlery, and the only customers who paid in coin were sailors home between voyages.

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Dessie Rowe came in on a Tuesday with his sleeve pushed up and asked you to copy what was on his arm onto a collar. Red roses bound with a dagger, and beneath them a grey skull with one eye shaded darker than the other. He had been inked in Portsmouth by a man who called himself Old Ransom and who never once looked up from his work. You didn't care for the skull. You liked the roses well enough.

You worked three weeks on it. Every rose needed thirty-one petals in bobbin lace, too many for the eye to count and too few for the hands to forget. When you finished, Dessie turned the collar over in his big fingers and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked whether you had ever sewn anything for a funeral. You said no. He said good, and paid you in silver florins wrapped in a handkerchief that smelt of tar.

The collar came back in October, folded in brown paper with a note in pencil: Wear it when the boats are late. You never did. You hung it in the window above the bobbins, where the afternoon sun could reach the roses and turn the thread the colour of rust, and every evening you counted the petals again, because there was nothing else in Hollen Bay that stayed where you left it.