Black and grey tattoo sleeve of roses over a mesh grid on the upper arm and shoulder, with a half fan design on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose sleeve over mesh and a fan on the arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair in a black top shows a tattoo sleeve of stylised roses and vines set over a fine black grid that covers the upper arm and shoulder. A separate half fan design with solid black fills and open white detail sits on the inner forearm near the elbow. The work is entirely black ink and grey tones, with bold fills and clean outlines against the skin.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Forearm Rose Fan Grid Vine Sleeve

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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

Mara had been sent down to the harbour with the mending net over her shoulder, because the boats would not come in until someone had counted the lines. Her mother kept the boarding house above the slipway and said a girl who could not sit still could at least be useful with her hands. The net was tarred cord knotted in a grid so fine that a herring could not slip through it, and every square had to be tight before the tide turned.

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Along the harbour wall grew a briar of wild roses that nobody had planted. Each June it climbed the lodging house steps, and each June Mara cut it back, and each June it came back wider, its heads dark as ink in the evening. Lodgers paid extra to sit beneath it. A commercial traveller from Leeds once told her the roses were the only thing in Saltcote that was not for sale, and she kept that sentence the way she kept her knots.

One night the fog came in thick and the boats called from beyond the bar, too far out to hear the bell. Mara strung the net across the end of the quay, weighted its corners with stones, and walked the length of it with a lantern held low. Each dark square of mesh let through a little of the lamplight, and the fishermen steered by those pale gaps until their keels grated on the shingle.

By morning the roses had dropped their petals on the slipway, and her mother counted the lines twice and found every one present. Mara never told her that she had worked a half fan of folded cord into the corner of the net, so that anyone coming in blind would know which way was home. Her mother found it in the spring, turned it over in her hands, and said nothing, which was how Saltcote said yes.