Colour neo-traditional tattoo of pink roses, a songbird and pansies with green leaves and soft grey shading on an upper arm.

Roses, songbird and pansies on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sleeve-style tattoo runs from the shoulder down the upper arm, featuring two pink and purple roses with green leaves at the top. A grey-green songbird sits below them beside a pale daisy-like flower and purple pansies. The bold outlines and soft shading give the design a classic, painterly finish, and the pastel colours are clearly visible against the skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Rose Bird Songbird Pansy Daisy Flower Leaves

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 roses came first, because my mother would not have a bird in the house that she had not earned the right to keep. So we planted them along the back wall of the Pennick cottage in the spring of 1953, two bushes bought off a man in Ludlow who swore they were a pink I had never seen. They were not pink, not really. They opened the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and by June the whole wall smelled of them, sweet enough to make the postman stop at the gate and sniff.

Keep reading

The wren came in October. I found it stiff on the coal shed step, a little brown lump with its tail cocked up even in death, and I could not bear to throw it on the midden. I wrapped it in my father's old handkerchief and buried it under the pansies, which had come up purple and cheeky along the path where nobody had asked them to. Mother said I was morbid. Father said nothing, only dug the hole deeper than I would have.

The next spring a pair of wrens built in the ivy above that same patch, and I swear one of them looked down at me the way a shopkeeper looks at a customer who has finally paid. I stopped telling people the roses were the best thing in the garden. Mostly I just sat on the step with my sleeve pushed up and let the wall do its sweet, stubborn work, waiting for the small grey thing to land on the path and make a fuss about the crumbs.