Realism colour tattoo of two pink roses with green leaves and a strand of pearls, on the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two pink roses with pearl strands

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two pink roses, one open and one partly turned, with green leaves at the upper left and lower left. Strands of small white pearls curve around the flowers. Shading is soft and smooth, with pale highlights on the petals and deeper reds in the shadowed folds, on lightly toned skin.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Pearl Leaves Flower

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

Sit yourself down, sit down, the kettle's on the old ring and it'll sing when it's ready. You want the tale of Orla Penhallow and the two roses in the Meridian garden, so mind the cuttings on the floor and don't tread on the seedlings.

Keep reading

Nobody on the ring had seen soil in three generations. The roses grew in trays under the amber lamps, fed on grey water and hope, and Orla kept the best of them alive by making a bargain with Tomas, the water engineer. He wanted something pretty to look at on his long shifts, and she wanted nutrient for her stems. So he gave her seed pearls from the sump tanks, where the cultured shells grew fat on the filtered brine, and she strung them on fine wire and hung them round the bushes so the light would catch them. Pearls for roses, that was the arrangement.

Then the first bloom opened in the dark of the night shift, pink as a sunrise nobody here had ever seen, and the second rose, the one she'd cut and traded to a family on the far spoke, flowered weeks later in the cargo bay. Two roses, one of them thought lost. Orla walked the spokes with a lamp, counting petals and knocking on hatches, and found that the bay rose had been wired with a string of pearls too, though nobody could say who had done it. Both of them leaned the same way, like two neighbours at the same window.

So when they tell you the far roses don't grow true, remember the pearls. Tomas kept one length of wire in his breast pocket until the day he went out through the lock, and I'm told it still turns up in the lamplight when the ring is quiet. Now drink your tea before it goes cold, and mind the step on the way out.