Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, poppies and buds covering a shoulder and upper arm.

Roses and poppies across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral design of open roses, poppies and closed buds spreads across the shoulder and down the upper arm, with leaves and thin stems linking the flowers. The work uses fine dark outlines with hatched and stippled shading to give the petals volume. The image is in black and grey, and the composition is cropped close to the arm against a white top.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Poppy Flower Bud Leaf Stem

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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

Now sit closer, because the wind off Porthcarrow takes the important bits and throws them in the sea. I'll tell you about Ada Penhale, who engraved flowers for a living, and the summer the harbour ran out of roses.

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She had a copper plate, a steel burin and a shop with a bell that rang whether you wanted it to or not. Every boat that went out carried a little pewter dish with her work on it, a rose opening on one side and a poppy on the other, the poppies cut a hair deeper so a man could feel them with his thumb in the dark. Nobody paid her much. They paid her in fish, mostly, and once in a clock that never kept time.

Then the Mary Lowen went out in March and didn't come back, and the wives came to her shop asking for dishes with no names on them. Ada cut them anyway. She hatched every petal with lines so fine they looked like breath on glass, and she stippled the shadows under the leaves until her thumb was blue with ink. Her hand shook the week she finished the last one, so she put the burin down and drew the rest with a pen.

Folk say the sea took the Mary Lowen's bell and kept it. Me, I think Ada simply stopped cutting roses and started growing them, out on the cliff where the wind tore the petals off before they could open. The poppies came up first. They always do, the old women say, where something has been lost.