Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and lupin flower spikes running along a forearm, drawn in fine linework with shaded petals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and lupin sprigs on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale forearm carries a black and grey botanical tattoo of a large rose with buds and leaves at the top, and tall spikes of lupin-style flowers with leaves running diagonally down the arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading in the petals and leaves that gives them volume. The plain grey background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Flower Bud Foliage

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

Dear Nell, the lupins came up on the dune behind the wall this morning, all at once, the way you said they would if I stopped fussing over them. Three spikes, blue at the tips and pale at the base, and the wind has bent every one of them the same way, like a row of men leaning in to hear a joke. I have not touched them. I told Mr Pryce the garden is no business of the Trinity House men, and he said the Trinity House men have never once asked how the roses were getting on.

Keep reading

The roses by the lamp room door have gone over. Your mother's Albertine, carried down from the rectory in a bucket the summer before she died, has three buds left, and I have been counting them each evening like coins I do not trust. Last week one split in the salt wind, petals brown at the edges, and I stood there with the kettle going cold because I could not decide whether to be sorry or glad it had bothered to open at all.

The fog came in on Tuesday and stayed three nights. I trimmed the wick every four hours and kept the log in the same neat hand I used for the Admiralty. On the second night I heard a horn out past the Carrick rocks, thin and close, and I climbed to the gallery with my heart going like a bird in a box. Nothing came of it. By dawn the lupins stood grey with wet and the roses smelled of pennies.

I have pressed one of the lupin spikes between the pages of your mother's psalter, which is where she kept the things she did not want to lose. Come in August. Bring the good secateurs and that terrible hat. We will cut what needs cutting and leave the rest for the bees, and you can tell me again how a garden knows where to grow when nobody has drawn it a map.