Close view of a woman's wrist and forearm with a fine-line black and grey botanical tattoo of roses and leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose cluster on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two roses with several leaves and buds sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with the hand raised towards the head. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft shading and stippling in the petals and leaves. The ink is grey-black on a warm, softly lit background of a mustard top and greenery.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Rose Leaf Bud Flower Floral

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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

Mr Aldous Penhale had been stippling roses for the Harcourt Seed Company since before the war, and he could tell a bad dot from a good one at twenty paces. On the Tuesday the new proof arrived from London, he held it to the window of the back room above the saddler's and frowned at the second bloom. "Too pale in the heart," he said to nobody, because Maud had gone to the post.

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The roses in question grew over the wall of the vicarage at Little Dunmere, a cluster of two blooms with buds tucked under their leaves, and Penhale had drawn them every July for eleven years. He used a pen with a single hair-fine nib and a pot of blue-black ink that smelled faintly of cloves. Each petal was built from thousands of small points and not one continuous line, so the eye filled in the shadows for itself. The trick, he had told his apprentice, was to leave the paper breathing.

Maud came back with the post and a letter in a hand he did not know. It was from the vicar's widow, asking whether the original drawings might be sent to her, because her husband had asked for them on his deathbed and she had nothing else of his that was not in a box. Penhale sat down slowly. He had never once considered that the work could leave the room.

He took the proof, found the pale heart, and worked it dark with a patient hand until the bloom looked as though it was turning towards the window. Then he wrapped the sheet in tissue and wrote the address in his best copperplate. Maud asked whether he would keep a copy. "No," he said, pressing the flap down with his thumb. "She has the one that matters."