Black and grey realism tattoo of three stacked roses with fine trailing stems and leaves along the side of the ribs.

Three roses with trailing leaves on a side ribcage

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three large roses are stacked vertically down the side of the torso, each rendered with soft smooth shading and fine detail in the petals. Thin botanical stems and small pointed leaves wind between the blooms and fade outwards. The work is entirely in black and grey, with the strongest contrast in the darker shadows of the upper rose and the lighter tones in the middle bloom.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Flower Leaves Stem

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 third bud had been sulking since March, and Mrs Pemberton stood over it in the glasshouse with her secateurs open, as if daring it to bloom out of spite. Her nephew had brought the stock up from Kent in a crate lined with wet sacking: three grafted cuttings the nursery swore would take on the old briar. Two had. The top one had opened early and gone papery at the edges by the first week of June, and the middle one had hung back so long she had started to think of it as a stubborn lodger.

Keep reading

She had wanted roses that looked as if they had been dropped from a height and caught mid-fall, heavy-headed and dark at the core, the way the Ashworth girls' garden had looked the summer before the house was sold. Nobody had asked her to recreate that. Still, each evening she tied the stems to bamboo canes with green twine and worked the shadows in with a sable brush and a little lamp black mixed into gum arabic, until the petals looked like pewter rubbed soft by thumbs.

On the last evening of June the glasshouse steamed after a storm, and the bud gave way. Mrs Pemberton knelt on the boards with a torch in her teeth and watched the petals unroll in the lamplight, grey at the rim and black where they folded under. Leaves had crept up the canes in a long trailing line, small and pointed, as though they meant to leave the house altogether.

She cut the three best blooms for the vicar's wife and left the stems where they stood. By August the leaves had pushed out through the cracked pane of the door and into the yard. Her nephew, arriving with the post, found the top rose still open in a jam jar on the kitchen sill, the colour of a tarnished coin, and her gardening gloves laid out on the potting bench, still shaped to hands that were no longer there.