Traditional style tattoo of a red rose with yellow and orange flowers, dark green leaves and a ribbon banner on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional rose and flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red rose with white highlight lines sits at the centre of a bouquet of small flowers, buds and dark green leaves, with a yellow and orange ribbon banner trailing from its stem at the bottom. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing. Colour dominates the composition, with the red, yellow and green set against pale skin and dark ink at the top edges of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Rose Flower Leaves Ribbon Banner Bud

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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

Mind the drain, it's been sulking since the rain. Right, you want the one about Nell Ardley and the red rose, the one the old flower men won't tell with the shutters down. She sold posies from a barrow outside the Bull Ring the winter the gas went out across half of Digbeth, and nobody could see what they were buying.

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One night a man in a long grey coat stopped at her barrow and asked for a rose out of season. Nell had only buds wrapped in newspaper, and she told him so. He laughed, not unkindly, and pointed at the bucket behind her, where a single rose had opened red as a tram light, its petals edged with white as if frost had got in. She had never put it there. He paid with a sixpence worn smooth as a river stone and asked her to tie the stem with ribbon, orange and gold, the colour of the fireman's lamp at the corner of Moor Street.

She kept the rose in a jar on the sill above her mother's chip shop. Each morning the ribbon had frayed a little further down, as though something were reading it letter by letter. The petals opened a fraction more every night, and the leaves crept to the edge of the sill. Her mother swore the rose drank from the drain. Nell swore she heard it humming the tune the hurdy-gurdy man played outside the Rep before he died.

The man in the grey coat came back in March. He didn't ask for the rose. He asked for Nell by the name she'd never told him, and when she gave it, he touched the ribbon and it went still. So here's what I told her. Cut a rose after dark and it keeps the hour you cut it in, and the lamps on Moor Street have never once been lit before the sun went down. If you see a red rose on a barrow once the lamps come on, don't buy it. Let it keep its hour.