Black and grey dotwork roses with leaves tattooed down a forearm, with a striped top and wooden floor visible in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two open roses are stacked along the forearm, each outlined in fine black linework with leaves between and below them. The petals are shaded with dense stippled dots that fade toward the edges, giving soft tonal depth. The palette is entirely black and grey, and the design fills the length of the forearm against a plain background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves Flower Petal

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

Mrs Ivy Partridge had been kneeling at the far wall since six, a folded sack under her knees while the dew soaked through. The two bushes were older than the new owners of the house, and she had told the estate agent so twice. Her nephew Col wanted them pulled out for a patio. She wanted one more June.

Keep reading

She cut the first bloom at its shoulder, the way her mother had shown her, and laid it on the wall to look at. The outer petals had gone soft at their edges, paler than the heart, and the light coming over the cedar broke them into a fine grain, like pepper dusted on paper. She had spent forty years trying to draw that grain with a nib and never got it right. Every dot is a decision, she used to tell her pupils at the village hall, and you cannot hurry one.

Col came down the path with a flask and a face ready for an argument. He stopped when he saw the two roses side by side on the sack, one open, one still closed tight as a fist, a leaf curled beneath each. "Those are for the vicar," he said. "Not yet," she said, and handed him the closed one. "Put it in water on the sill. Give it three days and it will open for you on its own."

He did. On the Thursday the kitchen smelled of it, and the bud had loosened into a slow spiral, its edges going from green to pale grey as the light found them. Col stood at the sink for a long time, then rang the estate agent and cancelled the digger. The rose was still open when the first van came up the lane.