Traditional style full arm sleeve tattoo in bold colour across the shoulder, upper arm and forearm, featuring a rosette, a grey skull in a hat, roses and an orange flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional full sleeve with skull and roses

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A bare-chested man shows a full arm sleeve on his left arm, cropped below the chest and with his face out of frame. The tattoo has bold black outlines and solid fills in red, green, orange, yellow and blue, with a grey skull wearing a hat, a geometric rosette on the shoulder, red roses, an orange flower and star bursts filling the gaps. The composition wraps around the arm from shoulder to forearm against a dark background.

Traditional Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Skull Rose Flower Rosette Star Leaves Mandala Sleeve Hat Ray

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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

You stop the Bedford at the cattle grid because the sun has found the crack in the windscreen and thrown a rainbow across the dashboard. Rays, you think, the way they drew them on the old fairground posters. Your father's hat sits on the passenger seat where he left it, grey felt gone soft at the brim, and you have carried it four hundred miles without deciding what it is for.

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Past the last pump the road runs straight and white for an hour. Tumbleweed rolls across it in loose rosettes, like wheels that have forgotten their cart. At a petrol station with one working pump you buy two bottles of water and a postcard of a lake that dried up before you were born. The woman at the counter has red roses painted on her nails, chipped at the thumbs, and she asks whether you're heading for the coast. You say you're going to see about a boat, though you have never owned one and your father never did either.

The marina is a car park now, the water a rumour somewhere past the dunes. You walk to the end of the concrete with the hat in your hand and the wind leaning hard on your shoulder. The brim keeps trying to lift, the way a skull's grin keeps trying to look past you. You set the hat on a rusted bollard and anchor it with a stone.

You leave it there with the crown tipped toward the sea and drive back the way you came. The light from the cracked glass follows you across the dash, bright and useless, like a compass that has stopped pointing anywhere in particular.