Colour traditional tattoo of three red roses with green leaves running diagonally across the side of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three red roses with green leaves on the back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

Three red roses are stacked diagonally down the side of the torso, each with layered petals, pink and orange highlights and dark red shading. Green leaves sit around the base of each bloom, and the bold black outlines are typical of traditional tattooing. The skin is smooth and evenly lit, and the composition is a close crop with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Back Rose 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

Sit yourself nearer the range, love, the wind's come round to the north again and it'll find every gap in that door. You'll want to hear this one properly, because my husband's grandad swore it was true, and he never told a lie he couldn't sell.

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Up past the top field, where the lane gives out at the gate, there were three rose bushes planted in a line down the bank, one above the other, like a man walking down stairs in his stockinged feet. Old Walter Hale put them in the spring the old barn fell, and every bloom was red as a robin's chest. Come December they were nothing but thorn and bare cane, with frost sitting on them like sugar on a bun.

The winter the snow shut the road for eleven weeks, Walter's boy Frank went up to cut them back, because the ewes had been pulling at the lower bush. He got to the middle one and stopped. Three red blooms sat open on a stem no thicker than a pencil, and the frost hadn't touched a single petal. He called his mother out to see, and she brought the milk jug down from the sill and filled it with them, and the kitchen smelled of June for a fortnight.

Frank never cut them again. When the snow came after, he tied the canes to the gate with baler twine and let the ewes find their own way round. Every January since, I've gone up with the jug and carried the three of them down to the table. Mind your cup, love. The frost can have the hedges. It doesn't get the roses.