Black linework tattoo of two roses, leaves and a hummingbird across the outer forearm, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and hummingbird on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm from near the wrist to the elbow and shows two open roses with layered leaves and a hummingbird in flight beside the upper rose. The design is drawn in black outline with light shading in the petals and leaves, and no colour ink is visible. The arm is shown from the side against a plain tiled floor, with the hand and a ring in the lower part of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Hummingbird Leaves Flower Bird

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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

By the time the August heat breaks over the walled garden at Hollins, you have stopped expecting the hummingbird to come back. Your grandmother swore it was the same bird that had nested in the honeysuckle the summer the church roof leaked, though nobody in the village had ever seen one this far north, and you told her so. She only laughed and set a saucer of sugar water on the wall beside the old damask roses.

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The roses are the difficult ones. Two of them, the pale open-faced kind the parish calls Lady's Hands, have been fighting black spot since May. You spend your mornings with a pencil and a cheap notebook, drawing the leaves so you can tell which are dying and which are only tired. The bird seems to know which blooms are finished. It visits only the ones still holding their shape, wings a blur against the dark serrated leaves, and it never once lands on the saucer.

On the last Sunday of the month, the vicar's wife finds you on your knees in the bed, sleeves rolled, muttering about aphids. She asks whether the cuttings will be sold at the fête. You tell her no, that the roses are for the bird. She laughs, until the hummingbird drops out of the lilac and hangs in the air a yard from her face, perfectly still, looking at her as though she were the one who had come to visit.

You don't cut the roses that year. You let them go to hip, and in October the saucer is gone, the bird is gone, and the wall smells of rain and split fruit. Your notebook has a new page at the back, with two open blooms drawn in pencil and a small arrow pointing at nothing.