Black linework tattoo of a stylised face framed by roses with red accents, on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised face and roses on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised female face in bold black linework sits on the upper arm, surrounded by roses outlined in black with soft red wash behind them. Small stars, a heart, a dot and diamond-shaped motifs fill the spaces around the face. Black ink dominates, with the red used sparingly as an accent against the pale skin and grey backdrop.

Upper arm Face Woman Rose Flower Star Heart Diamond Dot

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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 lodger in number four left his sketchbook on the hall table the week the rain came in off the Channel, and Mother said it was no use posting it after him, since he had paid through October and owed us nothing else. So I carried it up to the attic to dry by the chimney, and that was where I found the faces.

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Every page held the same woman. She had a long face split down the middle, one half smooth as a dinner plate and the other cut into hard triangles, with roses piled on her hair like a crown left out in the weather. Some pages gave her a heart beneath the chin, some a single dot, some a star scratched into a corner where the paper had gone soft with damp. On the last drawing he had washed the roses with red, as though he had run out of patience with pencil and reached for the paint pot in the scullery.

I took it down to the front room, where Mrs Abernethy was folding sheets on the settle. She turned to the red roses and went very still, then said the woman was called Vera and had once sold tickets in the kiosk at the end of the pier. She had walked out one February and never come back for anything she left behind. "He thought she'd return for the picture," Mrs Abernethy said, "the way you'd leave a lamp burning in the window."

The next morning the pier kiosk had its shutter up for the first time since autumn. Someone had painted roses across the glass in watery red, and the ticket window was crowded with paper faces pinned in rows, each one a little more cracked than the last. I stood on the wet boards with the sketchbook under my arm while the tide came in under the rails, and I did not go in to ask.