Arm with a full sleeve of traditional-style roses in red and blue-grey, with green leaves and thorns, covering the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose sleeve on upper arm and forearm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve of roses runs from the shoulder down the arm, with two large red roses, a blue-grey rose in the middle and a smaller red rose near the wrist. Bold black outlines, solid shading and green leaves with stems and thorns fill the gaps between the flowers. Red and pink tones dominate the colour, with grey and black used for the shading and the blue-grey bloom.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Rose Leaves Thorn Stem

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 Harrigan boy came up Cutter's Lane with a spade on his shoulder and his mother's note folded in his fist, because Mrs Fenwick at the end cottage was known to give cuttings to nobody under forty, and Mrs Harrigan was forty-one and had never once been forgiven for it.

Keep reading

The old woman had roses climbing the whole south wall of her cottage. Two were red as a butcher's apron, one pink going pale at the edges like a healing bruise, and all of them had leaves so dark they looked wet. Along the bottom ran thorned stems that the postman swore would take a finger off. In the middle of the bed, where her husband Albert had planted them before the war, grew a single bloom the colour of slate after rain. In thirty years nobody in Little Orme had seen it open all the way.

"Red," the boy said, before she could ask. Mrs Fenwick looked at him for a long moment, then walked him to the wall and told him to cut the stem below the second leaf and mind his thumb. "Roses don't care who asks," she said. "They care who waits." He cut it. The thorn went in anyway, and a bead of blood came up close to the same red as the petals.

He walked home with the stem wrapped in newspaper. Behind him the slate-coloured rose leaned out over the path, the way a dog leans toward someone it has decided to trust. By morning it had opened fully, a grey-blue cup as wide as a saucer, and when his mother went up Cutter's Lane to see it for herself she found the gate already open and the old woman sitting on the step, waiting.