Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose branch with open flowers, buds and leaves wrapping across a forearm, with a small bird above, against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose branch tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a trailing rose branch with two open five-petalled blooms, a closed bud, and several serrated leaves. Fine linework and stippled shading give the petals and foliage depth, and a small bird sits near the top edge of the arm. The image is in black and grey against a brick wall and grey ground, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Petal Leaves Branch Bud Bird

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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

My grandmother's hedge was the only thing in the kingdom of Vellmark that the king could not buy, and so he sent his men to pull it up the spring I turned sixteen. They came with mattocks and a wagon, and I stood in the lane with my bread in my apron and told them the roots went down further than their tools. The captain laughed until he saw me holding the old kitchen knife, the one that had cut a thousand briars back to the wall.

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What they had not counted on was the bird. It had nested in the hedge every year, a small grey thing with a voice like a rusted hinge, and when the first root came free it flew straight at the captain's face and would not leave. He swore and swatted, and the bird kept darting back, pecking at his ear, and while his hands were busy the hedge grew. I swear to you it grew. Canes came up through the cart wheels and wrapped the axles, and the two open roses at the top of the lane unfurled wider than their own petals, pale as milk, and the leaves turned their silver undersides to the sun.

By evening the wagon sat in the lane with its wheels bound, and the king's men had given up. The captain climbed down with a thorn in his palm and asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted the king to come and ask himself. He never did. But the next morning the rose bud at the end of the branch had opened, and I found a single petal pressed into the flour sack by the door, and the bird was perched on the gatepost, watching the road to the castle as though it had somewhere to be.