Black and grey fine line tattoo of a rose bud with leaves and thorny stem running down the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and stem on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single rose bud sits near the top of the forearm, with a long thorny stem curving down past two hatched leaves and a third leaf lower on the arm. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled shading on the petals and fine hatching across the leaves to give depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the composition is diagonal, following the length of the arm.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Rose Bud Leaves Stem Thorn

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

The bud was still shut on the ninth morning of the frost, so Alan from the council came up the lane with a pair of secateurs and asked whether we were going to let the thing rot on the stem. I told him it was not rotting. It was waiting. He said roses don't wait, they bloom or they die, and I said that was exactly the sort of thing a man from the council would know.

Keep reading

The rose had come up in the wall behind the chapel the summer my wife's sister left for Leeds, a single stem with a thorn on every node and three leaves that were nothing special until you held them to the light. Nobody planted it. Birds, Bertha said, or the wind carrying a hip from somewhere it had no business being. We pruned it twice a year and cursed it the rest of the time, because it wanted the whole wall and would take it if we let it.

On the tenth morning the petals had loosened just enough to show a rim of pink at the top, like a lamp left on in a shut house. I went out in my slippers and knelt in the wet with my knees complaining, and I did not cut it. I drew it instead, on the back of a seed packet, the way Bertha used to draw crooked stems before she grafted them, leaning so close my breath fogged the paper.

When Alan came back at noon with his clippers still in his coat, the bud had opened a finger's width and the frost had gone off the leaves. He stood at the wall a long time. Then he said he would come back in June, and I said June was a long way off for a rose, and he laughed, and that was the first time I had heard him do it.