Small black and grey rose tattoo with a bold outline on the side of a finger, photographed on a hand against a dark leather surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small rose on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a hand with the fingers extended and a small rose tattoo on the side of the middle finger. The rose has a bold dark outline with grey shading that suggests the petals and folds of the bloom. The dark leather background makes the tattoo stand out clearly.

Hand Rose

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

Sit closer, the stove's warm and the lock won't open till the tide turns. You want the one about Hettie Marsh and the grey rose? Her father kept the Lady Ellen on the Trent, forty feet of black iron with a cabin painted green, where the paint never quite dried in winter. Every boat through Keadby lock had something to sell, and Hettie sold nothing. She bought.

Keep reading

She bought one rose from a flower woman in Gainsborough who had only the one left, a bloom gone the colour of pewter from standing too long in a jar of river water. Hettie carried it aboard wrapped in a handkerchief. Every night for eleven days she unwrapped it and drew round its edges with a stub of charcoal on the back of the tally book, because she said a thing that was going to die should at least be kept in outline.

On the twelfth morning a coal barge jammed the lower gates, and her father swore at the chains until the sun was up. Hettie stood on the towpath with the rose in her palm. The water was high and brown and it lifted the whole boat a foot without anyone asking it to. She dropped the flower in. It turned once, pale side up, and the current carried it under the gates and out towards the Humber. Her father, who in forty years had never seen her give anything away, said nothing at all.

That night she opened the tally book to the drawing. Under it she wrote the date, the lock, and nothing else, and it's still in the cabin drawer, if you're wanting to see it. The outline's gone soft at the petals, but you can still tell which way the bloom was facing.