Traditional-style black outline rose and skull tattoo on an upper arm, with a blue rose and red floral linework on the forearm of a person with head bowed and arms crossed.

Rose and skull tattoos on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A shirtless person with tousled dark hair bows their head, arms crossed over the chest, with the face largely hidden. The upper arm carries a bold black outline of a rose and a skull, and the forearm has red floral linework and a fine ornamental design. A blue rose near the elbow adds colour against the pale, softly lit background.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Rose Skull Floral Script

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

Mags had been painting roses on the cabin side of the Perseverance since the boatyard closed, and the paint was always wrong in winter. The lamp oil thickened, the vermilion dulled to brown, and the brush dragged like it had a grievance. Her grandfather used to say roses wanted summer and skulls wanted nothing at all, which was why he never painted either.

Keep reading

In late October the new owner, a lad called Tobias Renn who had bought the boat off the wharf for cash, asked her to paint something that would make people look away. Mags said nobody looks away from a rose. She mixed the cobalt she kept for last, the deep blue from a tin stamped with a warehouse number, and sketched a skull inside the bloom, the petals folding over the bone like a lid someone had meant to close.

The lock-keeper at Hawbridge watched her work through the cold morning with a flask of tea going cold in his hands. He said nobody would ever see it under the tarpaulin. She said that was rather the point. The best things on the cut were the ones you found by accident when the cover slipped in a gale, and she had never once trusted a barge that didn't have a secret or two.

In April the wind tore the tarpaulin loose at Sallow Lock. A girl on the towpath stopped, read the blue rose from bottom to top, and laughed out loud. Mags, standing on the bank with a brush still in her hand, decided the paint had held after all.