Black and white photo of a small fine line rose with two leaves on a forearm, bent at the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small rose on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small rose on a stem with two leaves is drawn in thin, dark outline on the forearm, close to the elbow. The linework is delicate and uses no shading, so the flower reads as a simple open bloom. The photograph is black and white and shows a bent arm against a plain light background, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Rose Stem Leaves Flower

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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 galley on the Marjorie Quayle smelled of carbolic and burnt porridge, and nobody aboard had ever seen me sit down before the cutlery was counted. So when I started drawing on the back of the duty roster in pencil, the deckhands assumed I was costing stores.

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I was drawing a rose. Thin stem, two leaves, a bloom opened only as far as a thumb could cover. I had learned it from my mother's apron hem one winter when the mill was on strike, and I had never managed to draw it bigger than a postage stamp. Every night in the Western Approaches I tried again, and every night the page went into the stove before the watch changed.

Then Fenwick, the second engineer, a Glasgow man who could not hold a tune, leaned over my shoulder and asked why my roses kept getting smaller. I said the fine lines were the only ones the sea left alone. He laughed until he coughed, took the pencil from behind my ear, and drew a rose of his own on the lid of the flour bin, larger and crooked, with a leaf that looked like a boot.

I kept that tin. When we docked at Immingham I found the lid still there, his crooked rose bright under the quay lamp, and I set it on the galley shelf beside the salt, where I would have to look at it every morning and draw mine a little smaller anyway.