Close-up of a teal and blue rose tattoo with green leaves on the inner wrist, in a traditional style with dark outlines and shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal rose on the inner wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single rose in bright teal and blue sits at the centre of the image, with its petals curling open and green leaves along the base. The petals are shaded with darker blue at the edges and lighter highlights, and the design is outlined in dark ink. The tattoo is shown on pale skin against a dark background, with the subject filling the centre of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose 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 gulls had been at the bins again when you unlocked the shop, and the fishermen's wives were already lined up for their Monday carnations. Mrs Penhallow wanted blue roses for the memorial, though she knew as well as you did that no rose grown on this earth came that colour. You had told her so twice. The third time you took her order anyway, because the Dutch supplier's catalogue still listed one, a dye-fed cutting that never quite behaved.

Keep reading

Her husband had gone out past the breakwater in February, and the boat came back without him. Every morning since, she had walked the harbour wall at low tide, counting the moored hulls as if one might have slipped home by mistake. You filled the copper bucket with white stems soaked in teal dye, trimmed each end on the slant, and watched her fingers find the petals one at a time, the way you might test a stranger's handshake for sincerity.

After closing you carried the spent dye water down the slipway to empty it. The sea took the colour at once, a bruise of blue spreading across the green swell, and for a few seconds the harbour looked like a painted thing, something you could have lifted off the wall with a knife.

She came back the next morning without buying anything. She only asked whether the roses would last. You told her Thursday, perhaps Friday, and she nodded as though that was longer than she had expected. Then she tucked one bloom inside her coat and walked back up the wall toward the water.