Woman in a black slip dress taking a mirror selfie, showing a grey realism rose sleeve on her upper arm, a portrait tattoo on her forearm and a small eye tattoo on her chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose sleeve and portrait tattoo on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black slip dress takes a mirror selfie against a pale wall, with her left arm raised to the wall. Her upper arm and forearm are covered in black and grey shaded tattoos, including large roses and a portrait-style figure with soft, detailed shading. A small eye inside a triangle sits on her chest near the neckline, and a smaller rose is visible on her other arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Chest Rose Portrait Figure Eye Triangle Sleeve Mirror

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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

By the third week out of Valparaíso the swell had stopped being weather and become a kind of furniture, and Mags Tolliver had given up trying to keep a pan still on the galley stove. She sat instead at the scrubbed table with the purser's pencil and the back pages of the manifest, drawing roses in the margins because the sea made her hands want something that opened slowly.

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The portrait came from Dom, the youngest fireman, who had asked her on the second night to draw his mother from memory. She drew the cheekbones first, then the set of the mouth, shading with the side of the lead until the paper warmed under her thumb. Dom watched from the coal bunker hatch with his arms folded, saying nothing, and when she finally tore the sheet loose he took it as though it might blow away.

Two days before the Horn the chief engineer found the eye. Someone had scratched it above the bulkhead by the chart room: a single open lid inside a triangle, the kind of mark men cut into wood to say I was watching when nobody else was. He wanted it scrubbed. Mags told him the paint would lift it in a week, and he said that was the trouble with paint.

Off the Horn the rain came sideways for nine hours. Mags stayed at the table after the watch changed, finishing one last rose with its petals curled tight against the cold. When the lamp swung and the galley clock stopped, she pinned the drawing beside Dom's mother and left them facing the same wall, neither of them looking at her, both of them, she hoped, keeping an eye on the weather.