Rose tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person kneels on a white yoga mat printed with blue and purple paisley motifs, reaching down with one tattooed arm. The forearm carries a shaded black and grey rose with fine linework, and more dark ornamental tattooing continues up toward the upper arm. The blurred blue tiled floor and soft focus keep attention on the arm and the patterned mat.

Botanical Forearm Upper arm Rose Mandala Paisley Arm

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 lock keeper at Sallow Mill had a saying about boats painted too prettily to be trusted, and he used it on Ada Pell's narrowboat every time she came up through the gates. She ignored him. She had her roses to think about. Every spring she mixed her reds and greens on an old saucer and painted a rose on each cabin door, the way her grandmother had, and every spring the river took a little more of the paint off the hull.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had told her about the bargeman's wife who walked the towpath after the drowning, carrying a basket of black seeds shaped like bent flames. Wherever she dropped one, a rose would rise. Nobody took the story seriously. But the winter the river covered the lower meadows, Ada found the cabin floor strewn with those dark curled seeds, and she swept them into a jam jar and set it on the sill.

In April a man with a tin trunk came up the towpath and asked to buy the jar. He offered a fair price, then a better one. Ada told him the seeds were not for sale. He laughed and walked on towards the bridge. That night the jar was empty, and on the sill, where the sun had warmed the glass, a single black shoot had pushed through the wood. By the end of the week it had opened into a rose, dark and shaded like the inside of a closed eye.

She did not paint that rose on the door. She pressed the shoot into the soft grain of the tiller and left it there. When the lock keeper came through in May he looked at the boat for a long time and said nothing at all, which for him was the highest praise going.