Pale white ink outline of a rose with leaves on the inner forearm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rose with a layered bloom and several leaves is outlined in white or very light ink on a forearm. The linework is bold and even, with no shading, and the design fills the upper half of the arm. The image is taken in soft daylight against a pink and orange background, so the pale ink reads as a subtle raised outline on the skin.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Rose Leaves White ink Outline

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

The first rose I found was on a boulder above the Halde pass, drawn in white paint so pale that at noon it sank into the limestone. I only saw it because my torch caught it at a slant: a bloom of layered petals with leaves fanning out beside it like open hands. Papa had always said the marked stones were only waymarks for the goatherds, and I was twenty-two and believed him.

Keep reading

The customs post had a rule that nobody crossed after dark without a stamped paper, and the valley men had a rule that they crossed only when the lamps were low. Every few weeks the rose was somewhere new, outlined on a gatepost, a water trough, the lintel of the chapel. Nobody in the village would say who drew them. Old Marta, who sold cheese from a handcart, only laughed and said the stones were getting prettier.

One February I climbed to the boulder with a pot of chalk paste and the brush Papa used for whitewashing the byre. I traced the petals over the faint ones, slowly, until my fingers went numb and the snow began to blow sideways. When I came down, a man was waiting at the foot of the track with a mule and a lantern. He looked at my hands, then at the stone above me.

He did not ask my name. He asked whether the leaves on the left needed another vein, because the rose had always looked lopsided to him. I said yes. He nodded, took the lantern up the path, and by morning the post had nothing to report but snow.