Small pink watercolour-style rose tattoo with green stems and leaves on the forearm of a person in a grey top.

Two pink roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two soft pink roses sit on a stem with two small green leaves, drawn with loose, feathered edges that suggest a painted watercolour look. The roses are small and placed off-centre on the forearm, with plenty of bare skin around them. The background is a blurred grey top and a warm, muted wall, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Stem Leaves

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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

The ferry has already left by the time you reach the slip, so you sit on a bollard with your brushes rolled in oilcloth and wait for the tide to lift the cold off the chandlery step. Mr Haddow wants the name on his door repainted before the regatta. He wants it gold. You have told him gold leaf won't hold in this damp, and he has told you his late wife chose gold, so gold it will be.

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Upstairs in the sign loft the air tastes of linseed and salt. You drag the old paint box across the boards and lift the lid, and in the bottom tray, under a crust of dried cadmium, you find a sheet of cartridge paper with two small roses on it. Someone painted them in a hurry with a wet brush, the petals bleeding outward like breath on glass. The leaves are only green smudges, and the stem trails off the edge as if the painter was called downstairs mid-stroke. There is no signature, only a thumbprint of pink in the corner.

You spend the afternoon on the gold letters, cutting each one clean against the light from the harbour. When the last serif is down you pick up the pink, thin it with a drop of water, and paint two roses low on the frame, where the wood meets the step and the rain will take its time with them. They come out softer than you expected, the edges feathered as if the colour has been allowed to wander.

When Haddow comes down the quay at dusk to inspect the work, he squints at the gold, nods, then stops at the bottom corner. He asks what the flowers are for. You tell him they were in the box when you opened it, and that somebody must have wanted them kept.