Black and grey rose tattoo with a long stem and leaves, placed centrally on a woman's chest below the collarbones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose tattoo on the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single rose with a closed bloom, long stem and several leaves is tattooed vertically at the centre of the chest. The linework is fine and the petals and leaves are shaded in black and grey, giving depth to the bloom. The cropped photo shows the chest and a hand with dark nail polish resting above the tattoo against a dark green top.

Botanical Fine line Chest Rose Stem 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 heat comes off the tarmac in sheets by the time you reach the Sallow Creek turn, and the rose is wrapped in a damp shirt on the passenger seat where you can keep an eye on it. Nobody on this road buys flowers. You know that. Mrs Okafor at the diner told you to take it anyway, the one grown in the greenhouse behind the water tower, because the bloom is shut tight and will stay shut until someone needs it to open.

Keep reading

You drive with the window down and the radio dead. Mesquite goes past in grey fists. Every twenty miles a fence post leans over the verge as if it is listening, and you slow for each one because the stem has to lie flat, and the leaves, the colour of old pennies, must not catch on the seat belt. Your hand keeps finding the bloom through the cloth. It feels closed the way a fist is closed, not the way a bud is.

At the cattle grid above the dry lake you stop and unwrap it. The petals are dark at the edges and paler in the middle, as if someone had pressed a thumb of ash into each one and then thought better of it. You think about the photograph Mrs Okafor keeps tucked behind the till, the girl who rode off with a rodeo man one spring and sent back nothing but a postcard of this same lake. You never asked which of them had made the promise to keep the bloom closed.

You lay the stem back on the seat. Ahead, the road bends toward a town with no name on the signs, and a single light is on in a window, waiting for a rose that has never once been allowed to open.