Black and grey rose tattoo with shaded petals and leaves on the inner forearm, with a raised hand visible above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single rose in profile sits on the inner forearm, drawn with bold black outlines and shaded with dense stippling and hatching in the petals. The bloom is shown from the side with a curled centre, outer petals and two small leaves at the base. The ink is black and grey only, and the rose is framed by plain skin with a soft white rug blurred in the background.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Flower

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 tide was already turning under the Constance Mae when Dougie Pell came up the companion ladder with the chart rolled under his arm and told me to stop staring at the harbour wall. I wasn't staring at the wall. I was staring at the drawing pinned above the chart table, a rose done in pencil and biro on the back of a fish-market invoice, its petals gone soft from being handled.

Keep reading

Nobody on the fleet would say who drew it. Mags Kinnear ran the ice house at Skerrow Quay and had a steady hand with a pen, and the story was she'd done it the winter her husband went out past the Drowned Bank and came back two days late with his nets full and his hair gone white. We fished the same grounds after that and never spoke of it, though every skipper kept a sprig of something pale tucked behind his wheel.

Three days later the wind came round to the north-east and the glass fell through the floor. We ran for the bar with the rail under green water. Dougie lashed the wheel and I stood in the doorway counting the gaps between swells, thinking about the curl in that drawing, how the centre folds in on itself and still keeps its shape. When the bar finally opened I saw the lamp on Skerrow Point burning steady, exactly where Mags had always said it would be.

Next morning I took the invoice down and smoothed it flat on the chart table. I asked Mags for a fresh copy in ink. She looked at me over her spectacles and said a rose only lasts if you keep it out of the wet. I pinned the old one back up anyway, damp at one corner, and went to work.