Black and grey blackwork tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded face with one eye, white outlined roses across it and a hatched shell shape below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded face and rose on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a shaded face with slicked back hair, one eye visible, with a white outlined rose and leaves drawn over the face. Below, a pointed panel contains wavy hatching and a shaded shell or bulb shape. The work is built from solid black fills, grey shading and fine white linework against dark skin and a dark background.

Blackwork Forearm Face Eye Rose Hair Shell Leaves

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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

Sit by the flour sacks, love, and keep your hands off the oven door, it bites before the sun is up. Mr Greaves was the same. Every morning at four he came down Tanner's Row with his hair combed flat and black with pomade, not a strand out of place, and he never once looked anyone straight in the face. Only the one eye would turn, quick, the way a sparrow checks a crust.

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The bush on the yard wall had been his wife's. She planted it the spring they married, then went off with a travelling fiddler before the second frost, and the rose kept on without her. Every dawn he cut one bloom and laid it on the windowsill above the proving trays. The petals browned a little more at the edges each day, and he never threw one away. People said he had gone soft. He had not gone soft. He had gone patient, which is worse in a baker.

The shell loaves were her idea too. She had a copper mould shaped like a cockle, ridged like the sea on a tin tray, and he still baked with it, a dozen before light, each one scored in wavy lines the old women called the tide. One winter he left the last loaf on the sill too long, and in the grey hour a bird pecked it open and a rose petal dropped straight into the crumb.

So when the fiddler's cart came rattling down the row that morning, Greaves was already tearing a loaf apart with his bare hands, hunting for a petal. He found it. Some things keep. Then he stood in the doorway with flour to his elbows and waited for her to step down. That is the whole of it, love. Now mind the oven.