Black linework roses inside an overlapping triangle design with red, green and blue watercolour splashes, tattooed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and triangle with watercolour splashes on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two interlocking outlined triangles with a large rose at the top and smaller roses at the lower left and right, drawn in fine black linework with light grey shading. Loose watercolour-style splashes of red, pink, green, blue and yellow surround and overlap the design. The tattoo sits on a forearm photographed straight on against a dark background.

Fine line Botanical Geometric Forearm Rose Triangle Flower Watercolour splash

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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

The lamp room shutters had been painted the same green since my mother-in-law's time, and by March the paint had gone the colour of pond water. Tom said to leave them be. I took the tin of watercolours from the drawer where the tide tables lived, a jar of rainwater and a brush worn down to a whisker, and started at the top of the north shutter where the damp had never got in.

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The old keeper's logbook had a sketch tucked in its back pages: two triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down, locked together like clasped hands. Beneath it he had written, 'the light falls three ways.' I didn't understand that until I climbed the ladder and watched the beam slide across the glass each night, throwing its shape onto the water. The roses came from the seed catalogue Tom's sister posted every winter, the pale heavy-headed kind that bow under rain.

I drew the roses in pencil first, then let the colour bleed in around them. Red for the fishing boats that came back in the evenings. Blue for the harbour wall after a shower. Green where the ferns crept up the cliff path. Yellow I used sparingly, because it was the colour of the oilskins Tom had worn the night the Maud went down, and he had never quite wanted to see it again.

When the first proper rain came, the colours ran together and the roses seemed to swim off the wood. I thought I had ruined it. Then the lamp came on at dusk and sent its three white arms across the sea, and the wet paint caught the light and glowed as if it had been lit from inside. Tom stood at the foot of the ladder with his hand shading his eyes and did not say leave them again.